Satellite Derived Geospatial Irrigation Performance Indicators for Benchmarking Studies of Irrigation Systems

A. V. Suresh Babu, M. Shanker, V. Venkateshwar Rao

National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), Department of Space, Government of India, Hyderabad, India.

DOI: 10.4236/ars.2012.11001                

Abstract

Development of irrigation infrastructure and its efficient management is the primary concern for sustainable food production. The assessment of irrigation infrastructure creation, its utilization, diagnostic evaluation of the various performance indices (monitoring) are important to measure the efficiency. Benchmarking of Irrigation Systems (BIS) is for the diagnostic analysis of irrigation performance indicators comprising of Irrigation Infrastructure System (IIS), Agricultural System (AS), Water Delivery Dynamics (WDD). Since, the performance of an irrigation command varies with space and time, utilization of spatial information technologies viz. Remote Sensing (RS), Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Global Positioning Systems (GPS) useful to provide spatial information on several indices in the process of benchmarking (BM). Information requirements for BIS at different stages, utilization of spatial information technologies to derive irrigation performance indicators was discussed with suitable examples and demonstrated in this study. The studies carried out indicates that the geospatial approach for BIS enabled the improvements in data collection methods, diagnostic analysis, spatio-temporal visualisation of BM indicators at disaggregated canal level which would be useful for decision support during the corrective management measures. The conjunctive use of multi-date (medium resolution) satellite data, high spatial resolution data, field data on water deliveries was found to be an alternative to the conventional non-spatial approaches for BIS and thereby better water resources planning and management.

Keywords

Irrigation; Agriculture; Benchmarking of Irrigation Systems; Geospatial Techniques; Remote Sensing; GIS

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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