Milk River Basin Micrometeorology Data 2022 to 2024

This dataset was collected under the auspices of the St. Mary’s – Milk River Consumptive Use Study to provide latent heat and surface temperature ground truth data to test remote sensing products that estimate evapotranspiration, and in turn, consumptive use from irrigated fields (e.g., Senay et al., 2019). These remote sensing techniques are valuable because they provide spatially distributed data of recent evapotranspiration losses in between watering that can inform water manager decision-making during the active irrigation season. The data can also be used to assess the accuracy of current conventional operational methods (Bennett et al., 2014) to determine net irrigation requirements (i.e., crop coefficients and estimates of potential evapotranspiration) in irrigable areas of the Canadian Prairies.