Appendix L: Evapotranspiration Estimation from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Imagery

Year
2018

In this Appendix, we present mapped estimates of crop evapotranspiration (ET) employing high resolution multispectral images from a drone, identified henceforth as an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), based on the METRICtm (Mapping Evapotranspiration at High Resolution using Internalized Calibration) model for estimating consumptive use in alfalfa, pasture, and corn in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. METRIC is commonly applied to estimate actual evapotranspiration (ETa) using the alfalfa-based reference evapotranspiration (ETr). The original METRIC approach employs satellite Landsat8 (L8)images and produces evapotranspiration maps at a 30-meterresolution. This study presents ETmaps at a 1 and 0.05-meter resolution from UAVs to evaluate in-field ET differences otherwise not captured by the coarser-resolution Landsat images.

Resource Type