Satellite technology could help Nevada tracks water use

RENO, Nev. (News 4 & Fox 11) — In Nevada’s high desert, water is everything.

“If we don’t have water, nothing grows,” said Fallon farmer Abe Schank.

For generations, farmers and water managers have relied on meters, manual reporting and field monitoring to understand how much water crops are using. But a newer technology called OpenET is giving them another option — one that works from space.

Total Evapotranspiration across the country in 2021(Courtesy OpenET)OPEN ET.jpg

OpenET is a nonprofit platform that uses NASA satellite technology, weather information and remote sensing technology to estimate evapotranspiration, or “ET.”

That’s the process of water moving from the ground into the atmosphere.

It combines two things:

Evaporation: Water leaving the soil, canals, lakes or other surfaces and turning into vapor.
Transpiration: Water absorbed by plants and later released into the air through their leaves as they grow.

“OpenET uses satellite data and remote sensing techniques in order to have an estimate of the amount of evapotranspiration occurring at the surface,” explained Thomas Ott, an assistant research scientist with the Desert Research Institute.

The satellite system uses thermal imagery to detect temperature differences on the ground. Cooler surfaces often mean more water is being used by plants.

“If you walk onto grass or a well-irrigated surface, it’s a lot cooler,” Ott said. “The reason why it’s cooler is because it’s using water.”

The data is updated nearly in real time and can look back historically as far as 1985 using archived satellite imagery.

Water used to flood farming fields in Fallon (News 4)

Ott said the information can help everyone from individual farmers to state water managers better understand long-term water use.

“One of the places that OpenET is being used right now in Nevada in particular is through the Nevada Water Initiative,” Ott said. “The goal of the initiative is to reassess groundwater availability…

Source