Title: Remote sensing in water balance modelling for evapotranspiration at a rural watershed in Central Greece

Authors: Nicolas R. Dalezios; Nicholas Dercas; Anna Blanta; Ioannis N. Faraslis

Addresses: Department of Civil Engineering, University of Thessaly, Pedion Areos, Volos, 38334, Greece ' Department of Natural Resources Management and Agricultural Engineering, Agricultural University of Athens, Athens, Greece ' Department of Forestry, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece ' Department of Planning and Regional Development, University of Thessaly, Volos, 38334, Greece

Abstract: There is an increasing trend in water balance modelling for remote sensing tools, which provide distributed information of watershed features. The paper's objective consists of exploring the remote sensing potential for evapotranspiration estimation in water balance modelling of a small rural watershed with limited data, namely Portaikos rural mountainous watershed of 132 km2 in Central Greece. Three water balance models with small number of parameters are used, namely Abulohom's, GR2M and Xiong-Guo model, respectively. Two approaches are considered. At first, monthly potential evapotranspiration derived from conventional meteorological data is used as input to the models. Second, air temperature is derived from land surface temperature (LST) of NOAA/AVHRR satellite images for monthly evapotranspiration estimation. Time series of the above parameters for 13 years (1981-1993) are used. The remote sensing potential for evapotranspiration estimation is assessed by comparing the observed and simulated monthly runoff at the output of Portaikos watershed. Four error statistics are used for validation. The results are considered quite satisfactory for the four error statistics. The GR2M shows relatively better performance than the other models for all the error statistics, as well as for the satellite-based approach, which shows slightly better performance than the conventional approach.

Keywords: remote sensing; rural watershed; evapotranspiration; ET; satellites; water balance models; water resources management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSAMI.2018.099219

International Journal of Sustainable Agricultural Management and Informatics, 2018 Vol.4 No.3/4, pp.306 - 337

Received: 04 Jul 2018
Accepted: 19 Oct 2018

Published online: 23 Apr 2019 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article