Irrigated Crop Mapping in the Upper Colorado Basin
Reclamation is charged with measuring consumptive water use (water that is physically removed, either through export or evaporation) within the Upper Colorado River Basin. Irrigated agriculture accounts for the majority of consumptive water use within the Basin, and Reclamation measures this use by multiplying estimates of crop area (m2) derived from remote sensing by daily crop-specific water use estimates (m d-1), then summing these daily results to generate seasonal and annual values. Locally measured weather data (solar radiation, air temperature, wind speed, hu