Estimating the Agricultural Water Consumption of the Yellow River Basin Based on Remote Sensing data

Abstract:

Water shortage for agricultural water use is a major problem in the Yellow River Basin. This research uses NDVI value, meteorological data, supervised classification in remote sensing image classification and actual statistical data to estimate and verify the wheat and maize distribution and their water demand in the Yellow River Basin. The validation of the estimate method is performed by comparing the distribution of CIESIN statistic data for 1990. To obtain the accurate water demand, the study used and compared two methods of calculating the total water demand. The first one is to make the crop water requirement per unit area multiply by estimated crops total area of the basin. The second one is to sum the calculated water demand of each province. The research found that the remote sensing data can be used to estimate the crop area, while it overestimates the water consumption by both of the two methods.