Summary:

Remote sensing techniques have a sound role now days in the field of agriculture, and more specifically in hydrology. Estimating evapotranspiration through satellites has been a trend the last years. Spectral signatures profiles of different crops are necessary for post-processing of satellite imagery such as ‘classification’ in order to verify the crop type and therefore estimate evapotranspiration. Moreover ground “truth” data collected during satellite overpass can verify the at-satellite results. Indeed, for this project study spectral signatures were collected during the whole phenological cycle of some agricultural crops in Cyprus using the GER-1500 field spectroradiometer with a spectral range from 350nm to 1050 nm. Furthermore an Entity – Relationship Database was design and developed in order to manage, search and store thousands of spectral signatures in a systematic way. The database was build in the Microsoft Access environment while the geo-location of each measurement is recorded based on coordinates. The database may be connected to a Geographical Information System. The primary entities of the database were set as the “spectral signature” and “crop type”. As the results have shown of daily ETc over specific crops in Mandria village (Paphos District), SW Cyprus, using remote sensing data was much closed compared to FAO 56 method. According to results, spectro-radiometric measurements are of vital importance when estimating ETc. The use of such tools in research regarding irrigation demand help in validating the research results and have increased accuracy. Monthly water demands of different crops were estimated and therefore future irrigation scheduling can be performed for similar crops.

Consortium:

• CYPRUS UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY (Coordinator: D.G.Hadjimitsis)
• NAGREF
• CYPRUS METEOROLOGICAL OFFICE