This project explores current and future water availability for irrigation across the Central Valley and western United States in collaboration with the US Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) and Yolo County Flood Control and Water Conservation District (YCFCWCD). Specifically, it is: (1) improving the representation of crops in hydrologic models; (2) simulating current and future available water throughout the Central Valley including groundwater, and distributions of water among competing uses; (3) assessing the impacts of future water availability on crop yields in irrigated agricultural areas; and (4) building targeted decision support tools for YCFCWCD water allocation.
Recent Project Highlights
Evaluation of WEAP-DSSAT simulated corn, wheat, and rice yields for historical climate over YCFCWCD using field trial and NASS data, and WEAP-DSSAT simulated crop evapotranspiration using satellite evapotranspiration data (Winter et al., in review)
Application of a decision-making framework to explore possible groundwater management strategies for Yolo County Flood Control and Water Conservation District (Mehta et al., in review)
Assessing crop conditions simulated by DSSAT using Sentinel-1 radar data and the Michigan Microwave Canopy Scattering model (Davitt et al., in preparation)
Geographic Focus
Central Valley of California, western United States
Application Readiness Level
ARL = 6 (Potential Demonstrated)
This project has coupled the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer Cropping Systems Model (DSSAT) and Water Evaluation and Planning System (WEAP), deployed WEAP-DSSAT over the Central Valley and YCFCWCD, and completed a structured decision scenario analysis using WEAP for infrastructure planning in collaboration with YCFCWCD stakeholders.
Principal Investigator
Cynthia Rosenzweig, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Project Team
Jonathan Winter, Dartmouth College, Columbia University
Alex Ruane, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
David Purkey, Stockholm Environment Institute
Charles Young, Stockholm Environment Institute
Vishal Mehta, Stockholm Environment Institute
David Yates, Stockholm Environment Institute
Charles Vörösmarty, The City College of New York
Kyle McDonald, The City College of New York
Balazs Fekete, The City College of New York
Marzieh Azarderakhsh, The City College of New York
Collaborators and Stakeholders
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Dartmouth College, Columbia University, Stockholm Environment Institute, The City College of New York, US Bureau of Reclamation, Yolo County Flood Control and Water Conservation District
Technical Overview
Irrigated farms account for 80%-90% of consumptive water use in the United States and $118.5 billion of US agricultural production. A major challenge for the hydrologic and agricultural communities is assessing the effects of climate change on the sustainability of regional water resources and irrigated agricultural land. A key component of this challenge is the fact that most point-based agricultural models that have sophisticated representations of crop physiology, management, and yield, and are thoroughly evaluated at the field scale, lack constraints on irrigation supply. This leads to inconsistent and occasionally implausible biases and errors that muddle the picture for stakeholders and policymakers seeking to understand agricultural sustainability issues.
To improve simulations of irrigated agricultural areas, we coupled the coupled the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer Cropping Systems Model (DSSAT) to the Water Evaluation and Planning System (WEAP) and deployed it over the service area of Yolo County Flood Control and Water Conservation District. DSSAT adds the ability to simulate yields and a more sophisticated representation of crop water use to WEAP, WEAP provides water supply for irrigated agriculture, and an iterative approach to running WEAP-DSSAT applies the water supply limitation from WEAP to automatic irrigation in DSSAT. Historical (1980-2008) simulations of WEAP-DSSAT for corn, wheat, and rice were run using a spatially interpolated observational dataset and evaluated against observed yields (field trial and NASS) and remotely sensed evapotranspiration (TOPS). Research still in progress includes improving the representation of groundwater in WEAP-DSSAT and conducting a full assessment of climate change impacts on irrigated agriculture for the Central Valley of California.
Additional Information
V. Mehta, C. Young, T. O’Halloran, M. Stevenson, and J.M. Winter: Groundwater and economic sustainability in Yolo County, California: Illustrating a quantitative analytic response to California’s new Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. Agricultural Water Management, in review.
J.M. Winter, C. Young, V. Mehta, A.C. Ruane, M. Azarderakhsh, A. Davitt, K. McDonald, V.R. Haden, and C. Rosenzweig: Integrating water supply constraints into simulations of California’s irrigated agricultural areas. Environmental Modelling and Software, in review.
J.M. Winter, J.R. Lopez, A.C. Ruane, C. Young, B.R. Scanlon, and C. Rosenzweig: Integrating Water Resource Scarcity into Future Agricultural Assessments. Anthropocene, in review.
A. Davitt, J.M. Winter, K. McDonald, C. Young, and V.R. Haden: Assessing Crop Conditions Using of Remote Sensing and Agricultural and Radar Modeling. in preparation
Related Research Areas