HR: 08:55h
AN: H41B-04    [PDF]
TI: Evaporation-based Estimates of Water Use in the Euphrates River Basin (Turkey, Syria, and Iraq) Derived from MODIS Imagery and the MM5 Mesoscale Climate Model
AU: * Zaitchik, B F
EM: benjamin.zaitchik@yale.edu
AF: Yale University Department of Geology and Geophysics, 210 Whitney Ave., New Haven, CT 06511 United States
AU: Smith, R
EM: ronald.smith@yale.edu
AF: Yale University Department of Geology and Geophysics, 210 Whitney Ave., New Haven, CT 06511 United States
AB: Almost 98% of the water available to the Euphrates River falls in the headwaters regions of central and southern Turkey. The river then flows 2,000 km through semi-arid and arid conditions on its way to the Persian Gulf, providing an essential agricultural and ecological resource for water deficit regions of Syria and Iraq. Both Turkey and the lower riparian nations have developed massive impoundment and diversion schemes over the past decades, boosting agricultural production from the region but causing tension over water extraction rights within the shared watershed. Indeed, the combined water use proposals of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq currently sum to twice the natural discharge of the river taken on an annual basis. Uncertainties associated with the measurement of water consumption make it difficult to quantify the impact of any particular irrigation scheme or cropping system on the hydrologic balance of the basin. Operational estimates are often derived from water withdrawal surveys or, more recently, from remotely sensed figures for total cropped area. Such estimates lack a physical link to water consumption. In this study, moderate resolution, high frequency images of the MODIS sensor were used to quantify water consumption in large irrigation schemes within the Euphrates basin. MODIS-based estimates of latent heat flux compared reasonably well with ground measurements, but the values differed considerably from latent heat fluxes predicted for the same period using the MM5 climate model with the NOAH LSM. The use of satellite imagery as an input to MM5 may rectify this discrepancy and improve understanding of land-use/climate interactions on the mesoscale.
DE: 1818 Evapotranspiration
DE: 1842 Irrigation
DE: 1878 Water/energy interactions
DE: 1894 Instruments and techniques
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting