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OpenET Moisture Measurement Tool is Proving Highly Accurate


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OpenET Moisture Measurement Tool is Proving Highly Accurate

This satellite image centers the meandering Sacramento river surrounded by rice fields. The fields are broken into primarily square and rectangular areas with the fields nearest the river being full of green and brown vegetation, and farther from the river they are flooded and appear dark blue.
This is a false-color image, acquired December 26, 2018, with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8, and shows flooded rice fields along the Sacramento and Feather Rivers. Inundated fields appear dark blue; vegetation is bright green.  
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

As the world looks for sustainable solutions, a system tapping into NASA satellite data for water management has passed a critical test.

Called OpenET, the system uses an ensemble of six satellite-driven models that harness publicly available data from the Landsat program to calculate evapotranspiration (ET)—the movement of water vapor from soil and plant leaves into the atmosphere. OpenET does this on a field-level scale that is greatly improving the way farmers, ranchers, and water resource managers steward one of Earth’s most precious resources.

Researchers have now conducted a large-scale analysis of how well OpenET is tracking evapotranspiration over crops and natural landscapes. The team compared OpenET data with measurements from 152 sites with ground-based instruments across the United States. In agricultural areas, OpenET calculated evapotranspiration with high accuracy, especially for annual crops such as wheat, corn, soy, and rice. The researchers reported their findings on January 15 in Nature Water.

“I was pleasantly surprised by the results,” said John Volk, lead author of the study and assistant research scientist and software engineer at Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev. “The accuracy in croplands was quite strong, particularly in western arid regions, which are important areas for agriculture and have water sustainability challenges.”

That’s welcome news for regions where OpenET data is already being put to work. In Northern California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, water resource managers are using OpenET to help farmers comply with state rules requiring them to report aspects of their water use. The new study “gives us more confidence that these numbers are accurate, and that OpenET is continually improving over time,” said Lindsay Kammeier, a senior engineer with the California State Water Board in Sacramento, who was not involved in the new research.

“ET is notoriously difficult to calculate,” she added. “Having a really accurate number helps us to make decisions to manage the environment, manage for agricultural uses, and manage for urban uses better and from a common understanding.”

Tracking the Invisible Movement of Water

While many people are familiar with what one inch of rainfall means, few stop to think about one inch of evapotranspiration returning to the atmosphere, said Forrest Melton, the OpenET project scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “OpenET is working to make the unseen process of evapotranspiration as easy to track as checking the amount of rainfall in the daily weather forecast.”

Evapotranspiration is the natural process in which water moves to the atmosphere from the surface. The term combines evaporation—water changing from liquid to gas (vapor) and rising from soil, lakes, and oceans—and transpiration, the “exhaling” by plants as they release moisture back into the air. After precipitation, evapotranspiration is one of the most important factors for estimating how much water is available for crops or other plants.

This map shows evapotranspiration levels across Central California including the Bay Area. Darker blue can be seen in the Central Valley.
In California, state officials and farmers are using satellite data through OpenET to track evapotranspiration to better manage water resources. The process is a window into the water consumed by plants and crops, such as those grown in the Central Valley.
NASA Earth Observatory using openetdata.org

For farmers and water managers, accurate data provides a measure of the amount of water required through irrigation to replace the water that has been consumed by evapotranspiration. Knowing precisely how much water is available helps people give plants the moisture they need to flourish, without needing to apply too much. And that, in turn, can help save money for water and for the electricity used to pump water for irrigation.

But all that rising water vapor is invisible, making it difficult and expensive to track on the ground.

Farmers, scientists, and others previously relied on estimates of “potential evaporation” based on temperature, humidity, and other weather data. Or they turned to ground-based stations such as flux towers, equipped with sensors that monitor carbon dioxide, water vapor, and the exchange of heat between Earth’s surface and the atmosphere—a process crucial to calculating evapotranspiration.

But while they tend to be highly accurate, flux towers are expensive to set up and maintain, so there are a limited number, and their data is local and cannot represent wider regions. That’s where calculating evapotranspiration from space comes in. Satellites pass over the same areas regularly, offering consistent monitoring.

OpenET’s primary observations come from the Landsat 8 and 9 satellites, a partnership between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. The satellites combine data on land surface temperatures and the greenness of plants, among other things. Cooler land surface temperatures over areas with healthier, denser vegetation, for example, usually indicate higher levels of transpiration. 

That data is then fed into models to calculate evapotranspiration at high resolution—about a quarter of an acre for each image pixel.

The new results show that for agricultural lands, OpenET data for monthly, growing season, and annual timescales had an average error rate of about 10-20%.

The OpenET consortium includes NASA, USGS, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture working with Desert Research Institute and nearly a dozen other universities, Environmental Defense Fund, and Google Earth Engine.

For more information, go to: https://openetdata.org/

By: Emily DeMarco, NASA Earth Science Division

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Feb 01, 2024
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      Imagine the fountain also has lily pads growing in its basin. The lily pads will use the fountain’s water to survive and grow, losing some of that water to transpiration. The total water lost is evapotranspiration, and is considered consumptive water use, because it cannot be reused by the fountain. Tracking evapotranspiration can tell you how much water is removed or “depleted” from a local water system, and how much water needs to be added back in to support plant growth and maintain a healthy balance between water supply and water use. If too much water leaves the fountain, it will stop running. If too much water is added, it will overflow.  

      These concepts can be applied more broadly to the hydrologic cycle as a whole, and evapotranspiration data can play an important part in designing and implementing sustainable water management practices to combat larger issues like drought, as well as both short and long-term reductions in water availability. Historically, ET data have been obtained from ground-based instruments and methods, such as weighing lysimeters, which weigh soil and plants to track the water volume lost by evaporation or transpiration. Another common method is called eddy covariance, which calculates the amount of water vapor transported away from the land surface by wind eddies as they move across the land surface. But both are expensive and difficult to install and maintain, and measurements are only representative of a small portion of an individual agricultural field. It is cost prohibitive to collect these measurements over larger areas. 


      What makes OpenET different?

      The OpenET team saw the important niche left open by traditional evapotranspiration measurement methods and filled it. They built upon decades of research funded by NASA, USDA and USGS and developed a new platform that can take easily accessible and already available data from satellite programs, like Landsat, and combine it with weather data to calculate the ET for every quarter acre of land. Satellites can record information like the Earth’s surface temperature and how much of the incoming light from the sun is being reflected back out to space. OpenET is able to use physically-based mathematical models to combine the satellite and weather data and output accurate data on evapotranspiration rates and volumes. 

      This information is then made easily accessible through OpenET’s Data Explorer, a free web-based tool that allows anyone with an internet connection to access the data OpenET provides. Users begin by selecting an area of interest from a map of the western United States that provides data at the satellite resolution of a quarter-acre, and also broken down into known areas of interest and individual agricultural fields, each color coded with a heat map of evapotranspiration. Cooler colors indicate higher rates of evapotranspiration while warmer colors indicate lower rates. Users can zoom into specific areas on the map, and with just a click, a chart pops up showing the evapotranspiration trends for a given area, for the current year and the past five years. 

      The chart can show monthly ET trends, useful for understanding seasonal fluctuations, and also cumulative trends, useful for understanding year-to-year changes in evapotranspiration. “The OpenET team took a user-driven design approach from the beginning, and each element of the Data Explorer and the open data services is there because a water manager or farmer asked for it,” Melton explained. As we played around with the map, it became apparent how much work was put into developing this project. Scientists needed to improve models and assess the accuracy of data, programmers had to develop the user interface and data services, designers needed to make the interface intuitive enough to be impactful, agriculture and environmental groups needed to help validate the model’s accuracy, and users of all types needed to provide requirements and then test the product to make sure their needs were actually met. 

      The OpenET consortium includes NASA, USGS, USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS), Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), Google Earth Engine, California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB), Desert Research Institute (DRI), Habitat Seven, Chapman University, Cornell University, University of Nebraska-Lincoln and close to a dozen other universities and experts across the U.S. NASA Ames Research Center and CSUMB have played key roles in the scientific and technical leadership of the effort from the outset, working closely with DRI, EDF and the recently formed non-profit OpenET, Inc. In addition, over 100 partners from the water management, agriculture and conservation community provided user requirements and assisted with the design and testing of the OpenET platform and tools.

      “OpenET would not be possible without the contributions of each one of those partners,” Melton said. “Both on the implementation side and those who are translating the data from OpenET into solutions to long standing challenges.” 

      Map of farmlands showing ET data for 2024. The cooler colors represent higher levels of evapotranspiration (ET), while warmer colors indicate areas with less ET.OpenET
      Models like those built into OpenET can be extremely useful tools for understanding patterns in ET and water use, but are only helpful if their accuracy is known. The OpenET science team recently completed the largest accuracy assessment to date for field-scale satellite-based ET data, comparing the satellite data to ground-based measurements at more than 150 sites across the U.S. Led by John Volk of the Desert Research Institute, the study was published in Nature Water earlier this year. A key finding was that across all sites, an ensemble value computed from six different ET models performed the best overall, leveraging the strengths of each individual satellite-driven model. 

      However, the study also found that some models performed best for particular crop types or regions, which is important information for water managers and farmers who need the most accurate data possible. Publishing the results as an open access study with all data and analysis made publicly available was also important to build trust in the data. While the study highlighted some limitations of the models and priorities for future research, the rigorous and reproducible accuracy assessment helps to build user confidence that they can use the data, while being aware of the expected accuracy for different applications of the data.  




      Bridging the Gap Between Farmers and Resource Managers

      OpenET has already contributed to one significant win for farmers that affects how water use will be monitored and reported in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. 

      This inland river delta covers 750,000 acres and is an important water resource in California, but one where accelerated demand combined with habitat loss and water quality issues has led to major concerns. In the Delta, large portions of the agricultural land are below sea level. Levees protect the fields and contain the river channels that supply water for irrigation. In 2023, the state began requiring farmers to maintain a water meter or measuring device on each diversion, where water is diverted from a river for irrigation. However, this measurement proved challenging and costly as there are thousands of diversions in the Delta, and the measuring equipment was inaccurate and difficult to maintain in this environment. In addition, water users also had to pay for meters at the locations where water that drained from the fields was pumped back over the levees and into the river channels.

      The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is a major water resource in California.Matthew Trump
      “Mostly, what the state was interested in was the consumptive use: how much (water) was actually removed from the supply in that region,” Melton said. “So, it’s the perfect place for using OpenET because evapotranspiration really is the majority of the consumptive use in the Delta, if not all of it.”

      After the launch of OpenET, farmers in the Delta worked with the Delta Watermaster, the California State Water Resources Control Board, the OpenET team and the Delta Measurement Consortium to develop an alternative compliance plan that used OpenET data to help streamline the water use required reporting for this complex region. Once the alternative compliance plan was approved, Forrest Melton and Will Carrara of NASA worked with the state Water Resources Control Board, the Delta Watermaster and water management agencies, and Jordan Harding of HabitatSeven to implement this solution. The Delta Alternative Compliance Plan, also known as the Delta ACP, allows farmers to use OpenET data to estimate their water usage; enabling farmers to complete their use reports in a matter of minutes. 


      “It’s the first time that satellite-based evapotranspiration data has been automatically integrated with a state-managed water reporting system,” Melton said. 
      Last year, more than 70% of farmers in the Bay-Delta region chose to use OpenET and to report their water use through the Delta ACP website, and they expect this percentage to continue to increase over time. 

      “The best part is that it is saving farmers hundreds of hours on preparing and submitting reports, avoiding millions of dollars in costs for farmers to deploy and maintain meters, and giving the state consistent and reproducible data on water use that has been reviewed and approved by the water user,” Melton said. 

      According to Delta Watermaster, Jay Ziegler, this approach has a clear benefit in the unique water flow setting of the Delta. “In reality, OpenET – and the use of publicly accessible data measuring ET is the only way to really discern consumptive use of water in the Delta on a reliable basis,” Ziegler said. “Candidly, we don’t really have a viable “plan B” in the absence of applying Open ET for water use reporting.”
      In reality, OpenET – and the use of publicly accessible data measuring ET is the only way to really discern consumptive use of water in the Delta on a reliable basis.
      Jay ziegler
      Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Watermaster


      Water Beyond Borders

      As water scarcity is increasingly becoming an urgent issue all around the world, it’s easy to imagine how many countries could benefit from OpenET data. 

      OpenET’s first international partnership is led by Anderson Ruhoff, a professor in Hydrology and Remote Sensing at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, where his team developed an evapotranspiration model called geeSEBAL for Brazil’s Water Agency.

      Ruhoff learned about OpenET while he was in the US on a visiting professorship in Nebraska. He was intrigued and reached out to Melton who encouraged him to attend an upcoming conference in Reno, Nevada, where OpenET would be featured. The conference was due to start in just a few days time.

      “So I had to find a last minute ticket to Reno and I’m glad I bought it, because when I arrived there they invited me to join Open ET. It was quite a coincidence,” Ruhoff said, smiling as he remembered the spontaneous decision. “We adapted our model for the US and started to participate in their work.”

      In March, 2024, Ruhoff and OpenET launched an extension of the tool, called OpenET Brazil, with financial support from the Agência Nacional de Águas e Saneamento Básico (ANA), the Brazilian national water agency. The tool, called OpenET Brazil, will have similar goals as OpenET in the U.S., and the data collected will help improve Open ET’s accuracy overall.

      Melton feels this will be a “great test case” for both working with new environmental conditions (in Brazil there frequently is more cloud cover than in the US during key parts of the growing season) and also developing new collaborations.

      “The partnership will help us figure out how we can work with international partners to make the ET data useful,” Melton said. “The key aspect of our approach to geographic expansion is that leading scientists in each country and region, like Dr. Ruhoff, will lead the implementation, accuracy assessment, and the development of applications and partnerships for their country.”

      Brazil has one of the world’s largest sources of freshwater, the Amazon River, and yet it can still be affected by drought. This is partly due to the fact that deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest has an impact on the entire region’s water cycle. Trees draw water up from the soil and during photosynthesis they release vapor into the atmosphere. This water vapor will accumulate and form precipitation. Trees are “basically a huge water pump,” Ruhoff said, and the Amazon Rainforest is large enough that it helps to produce the rainy season. But when deforestation is allowed to happen over large areas, that mechanism is interrupted. As a result of this disruption, the dry season is predicted to intensify, becoming longer and dryer, which in turn can affect crop production in Brazil as well as the rainfall that is critical for sustaining water supplies in Brazil and other areas of South America.

      “Water doesn’t see borders. It doesn’t follow our rules,” Ruhoff said. “Deforestation in one place can affect people thousands of kilometers away.”
      Water doesn’t see borders. It doesn’t follow our rules. Deforestation in one place can affect people thousands of kilometers away.
      Anderson Ruhoff
      Professor of Hydrology and Remote Sensing, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

      Studying evapotranspiration can reveal the impacts of deforestation with even more clarity. And importantly, it’s also public information. “So not only the farmers and water managers but every citizen can check how much water is being used in their area, especially during drought. It’s democratic information in that way,” Ruhoff said. “I think it’s important to have this information openly available and to try and reach as many people as possible.”

      Melton feels there’s the potential to expand the project, if more people like Ruhoff are there to lead the way.

      “There’s huge potential, but there do need to be stakeholders that come to the table and say that this is something that they’re interested in,” Melton said. “Water is so important and at times so contentious that it’s really important the data is seen as trusted. When there is a local leader, that substantially increases the likelihood that it will be trusted, and most importantly, used to bring people together to develop solutions.”


      The geeSEBAL application that Anderson Ruhoff’s team developed, which now informs the OpenET platform. Science Direct/Anderson Ruhoff

      Even when you live in a water-scarce region like California it’s easy to take water for granted. What platforms like OpenET can do for us, however, is make water, even in its most diffuse form, more visible to everyone.

      Written by Jane Berg and Rachel Sender, co-published with the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute

      To learn more about OpenET, visit https://etdata.org/

      Program Contact:
      Forrest Melton
      NASA Ames Research Center
      forrest.s.melton@nasa.gov

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      301-286-0039
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