Development of a water information system for global scale water use assessment

This project is carried out under the supervision of members of the Water Resources Department at ITC and Water Engineer and Management at the Civil Engineer Faculty of the University of Twente. Therefore, the content of the project is influenced by the research expertise and interest of both groups.

The main objective is the use of remote sensing techniques in the field of water management, particularly in ‘Water Footprint’ (WF) studies. The WF of a crop is defined as the volume of water consumed for its production, where green and blue WF stand for use of rain and irrigation water respectively.

The use of Earth observation products of evapotranspiration, precipitation, water storage and runoff is proposed in order to estimate volumes of irrigated water at global scale. Specific objectives of the project are: combination of multi-resolution and multi-spectral data, modeling the separation of ET in green and blue components, and ET modeling under cloudy conditions. The final goal of this work is to achieve WF calculations at global scale during the period 2002-2012 in an appropriate time step.