Long-term irrigation water use data with high spatiotemporal resolution (monthly, 1km) across the continental United States (2000-2020)- A Big Earth Data Platform for Three Poles

About 70% of the world's water withdrawl is used for agriculture, and irrigation water accounts for more than 90% of the total water consumption. Due to varied irrigation water sources, irrigation facilities, and crop planting types, there is large spatial heterogeneity in irrigation water use. Irrigation water can be consumed by evapotranspiration or stored as soil water in the root zone soil layer, while the portion exceeding the saturation zone will recharge groundwater. The complexity of irrigation processes above makes it extremely difficult and challenging to estimate irrigation water use.

Based on the soil water balance under irrigation, formulas to estimate irrigation water use (IWU) were deduced by us, considering multiple processes of irrigation (evapotranspiration, root zone soil moisture, and deep percolation). Remotely sensed and modeled actual evapotranspiration, modeled root zone soil moisture were used in our approach to generate the monthly IWU across the continental United States during 2000-2020 at a high spatial resolution (1 km). The results show that our approach has the mechnism to characterize multiple irrigation processes and can obtain IWU data with excelent accuracy at high spatiotemporal resolution.

File naming and required software

The annual and monthly irrigation water use data are stored in TIF format, and the unit is 'km³/yr' or 'km³/month'. The name of the file is ' yyyy_IWU_irr_area.tif' or 'yyyymm_IWU_irr_area.tif', where 'yyyy' represents the year and 'mm' represents the month. For example, 200501_ IWU_ irr_ area.tif represents this tif file and describes the irrigation water use for the pixel in January 2005. The irrigation water use value takes into account the area difference for different pixels, and the irrigation water use at state or county scales can be obtained by arithmetic average.
Data reading method: all TIF files in the dataset can be read directly using tools such as ArcGIS or MATLAB.

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Cite as:

Zhang, C., Long, D. (2022). Long-term irrigation water use data with high spatiotemporal resolution (monthly, 1km) across the continental United States (2000-2020). A Big Earth Data Platform for Three Poles, DOI: 10.1029/2021WR031382. (Download the reference： RIS | Bibtex )

Related Literatures:

1. Zhang, C., & Long, D. (2021). Estimating spatially explicit irrigation water use based on remotely sensed evapotranspiration and modeled root zone soil moisture. Water Resources Research, 57, e2021WR031382. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021WR031382( View Details | Bibtex)

Using this data, the data citation is required to be referenced and the related literatures are suggested to be cited.

Support Program

National Natural Science Foundation of China (52079065) (No:52079065)

National Key Research and Development Program of China (No:2021YFB3900604)

The Major Science and Technology Projects of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (No:2020ZD0009)

None (No:51620105003)

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License： This work is licensed under an Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)