What is in this article?:
- Satellites monitor groundwater for agriculture
- San Luis Valley
- Scientists have found a way to cheaply and effectively monitor aquifer levels in agricultural regions using data from satellites that are already in orbit mapping the shape of Earth's surface with millimeter precision.
When you dive into that salad full of lettuce grown in the American West, there's a good chance you are enjoying the product of irrigation from an underground water source. These hidden groundwater systems are precious resources that need careful management, but regulatory groups have a hard time monitoring them, owing to a lack of accurate data.
Now, scientists at Stanford have found a way to cheaply and effectively monitor aquifer levels in agricultural regions using data from satellites that are already in orbit mapping the shape of Earth's surface with millimeter precision.
The amount of water in a groundwater system typically grows and shrinks seasonally. Rainfall and melted snow seep down into the system in the cooler months, and farmers pull water out to irrigate their crops in the warmer, drier months.
In agricultural regions, groundwater regulators have to monitor aquifer levels carefully to avoid drought. They make do with direct measurements from wells drilled into the aquifers, but wells are generally few and far between compared to the vast size of most groundwater systems.
"Groundwater regulators are working with very little data and they are trying to manage these huge water systems based on that," said Jessica Reeves, a geophysics doctoral student. But now, Reeves has shown how to get more data into the hands of regulators, with satellite-based studies of the ground above an aquifer.
As the amount of water in an aquifer goes up and down, specialized satellites can detect the movements of the land above the water system and hydrologists can use that information to infer how much water lies below. Previously, accurate elevation data could only be acquired on barren lands such as deserts. Plants – especially growing crops, whose heights change almost daily – create "noise" in data collected over time, reducing their quality.
Now, a team of scientists led by Reeves has found a way around this "growing" problem.
The study began as a collaboration between Reeves' faculty advisers, Rosemary Knight, a geophysicist who studies groundwater systems, and Howard Zebker, a geophysicist and electrical engineer who uses satellite-based remote sensing techniques to study the Earth's surface. Knight and Zebker hoped that the combination of their expertise, and the efforts of their graduate student, would lead to new ways of using satellite data for groundwater management.
Reeves analyzed a decade's worth of surface elevation data collected by satellites over the San Luis Valley in Colorado. Although the valley is rich with growing crops, Reeves and her advisers hoped that recent advances in data-processing techniques would allow her to gain an understanding of the aquifer that lay below.
As part of her analysis, Reeves produced maps of satellite measurements in the valley and saw a regular pattern of brightly colored high-quality data in a sea of dark, low-quality data. After overlaying the maps with a Google Earth image of the farmland, the team realized that the points of high-quality data were in the dry, plant-free gaps between circles of lush crops on the farms.