A novel approach to the use of earth observation to estimate daily evaporation in a sugarcane plantation in Xinavane, Mozambique

Efficient irrigation water management for an 18,000 ha sugarcane plantation in Xinavane in southern Mozambique is a challenge. Sugarcane is an irrigation intensive crop and its productivity is sensitive to water stress. Options to adopt field water management best practices and proper irrigation scheduling are limited due to the lack of plot-level information on the actual crop water use and stress levels throughout the growing season. Due to heterogeneity in cropping calendar within the sugarcane plantation, at a certain point of time, different plots are at different growth stages. This makes scheme level irrigation scheduling complex and calls for frequent crop water use information. To fill this gap, this study presents a novel approach where a combination of satellite imagery with local weather data is used to provide daily evaporation rates. The Priestley–Taylor equation is applied to quantify evaporation (soil evaporation + transpiration) using radiation and temperature data from a meteorological station and spatial albedo estimates derived from the Sentinel-2 satellites. The results show 20 meter resolution maximum crop evaporation estimates can be derived with the proposed methodology. Additionally, the results show NDVI in the last two crop stages is able to distinguish between poor and good performing fields. Therefore, NDVI can be a useful index to estimate actual evaporation. First, the evaporation estimates were corrected for the crop stage using NDVI proxies and an additional stress indicator was used to calculate the actual evaporation flux spatially. The spatial evaporation estimates provide the water manager with information on actual crop water use and biomass development, which is relevant to both crop monitoring and irrigation management water management when drought-related stress is filtered.