EVALUATING WATER DISTRIBUTION EFFICIENCY OF PIVOT IRRIGATION SYSTEM IN EASTERN NILE DELTA USING REMOTE SENSING IMAGERY

Abstract

As results population increase water demand had increased the Government had to formulate policies and programs to improve water management for limited water resources. In particular agriculture sector, which uses more than 80 percent of available water. The per capita water resources are expected to drop from about 922 m3 per/year at1990 to about 337 m3 per/year in 2025. Furthermore improved planning and management procedures for appropriation water use and allocation are main key measures generally prescribed to make the optimum use of available water. Moreover essentially optimal water management is a prerequisite for sustainable development in Egypt. Remote sensing techniques offer solution to the limitations short comings of conventional methods for estimating crop evapotranspiration by providing real time information on the daily crop water use as influenced by development pattern of the crop, the crop coverage, local atmospheric conditions and field spatial variability. Also remotely sensed data can therefore give a real time mean of instantaneous estimation of energy balance and therefore the crop evapotranspiration, together with the percent of the crop stand. Sensible heat flux methodology using the optical satellite imagery found to be efficient to estimate the crop evapotranspiration as a residual of the latent heat flux. Traditional methods for center pivot evaluation are time and effort consuming; moreover it requires a high experience for field work. Estimation and mapping the collector’s water volume under pivot irrigation systems using remote sensing data is essential for calculating the coefficient uniformity (CU) of water distribution. The study oriented mainly to achieve the following objectives: 1. Calculating the different vegetation and water indices from different remote sensing data. 2. Compare between the traditional and remote sensing methods in evaluating the water distribution efficiency.