IRRIGATION PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT USING GEOMATICS TOOLS

Abstract

Managing water resources in the developing countries like India has been a challenge for decision makers. Last few decades has witnessed, that the rapid growth rates of population along with the Natural calamities such as famine and drought conditions and also the alarming rates of environmental issues like global warming have added to the complexity of this issue. Any Irrigation system invariably contributes to enhanced crop production and increased farm incomes to the rural households and it provides cyclical development in different sectors of the economy as a whole. However, some of the factors (viz socioeconomic, water use efficiency and environmental) impede the agricultural output despite substantial contribution by the irrigation systems. In such a situation it is imperative to evaluate the performance of the irrigation systems against its desired objectives which provide a crucial feed back to improve the water management to make the systems more accountable .To assess and evaluate the irrigation performance integrated use of Satellite Remote Sensing and GIS in support with ground information has proved to be efficient technique in spatial and temporal domain in identification of major crops and their condition and determination of their areal extent and yield. This study focuses on the estimation of Crop coefficient (Kc) and Crop Evapo-transpiration (ETc) using the multi temporal satellite image of Landsat 8 through different growth stages of crops integrated with the meteorological data and FAO-56 approach and subsequent mapping of Crop ET within the entire field on temporal domain basis. Further an attempt has been made to determine the irrigation water requirement of crops wihin the command area and finally evaluation of different irrigation performance indicators viz relative water supply, Overall consumed ration, depleted fraction, crop water deficit and relative evapotranspiration over Bahadarabad block irrigation system, Hardwar, India. The entire database has been organized in GIS environment in order to facilitate the efficient management and manipulation of the data. Further the Thematic maps and charts has been prepared in order to better assess irrigation performance in domain of each minor in Bahadarabad block irrigation system.