Multi-scale Assessment of Agricultural Consumptive Water Use in California’s Central Valley

Spatial estimates of crop evapotranspiration with high accuracy from the field to watershed scale have become increasingly important for water management, particularly over irrigated agriculture in semi-arid regions. Here, we provide a comprehensive assessment on patterns of annual agricultural water use over California’s Central Valley, using 30-m daily evapotranspiration estimates based on Landsat satellite data. A semi-empirical Priestley-Taylor approach was locally optimized and cross-validated with available field measurements for major crops including alfalfa, almond, citrus, corn, pasture, and rice. The evapotranspiration estimates explained more than 70% variance in daily measurements from independent sites with an RMSE of 0.88 mm day-1. When aggregated over the Valley, we estimated an average evapotranspiration of 820 +- 290 mm yr-1 in 2014. Agricultural water use varied significantly across and within crop types, with a coefficient of variation ranging from 8% for Rice (1110 +- 85 mm yr-1) to 59% for Pistachio (592 +- 352 mm yr-1). Total water use in 2016 increased by 9.6%, as compared to 2014, mostly because of land-use conversion from fallow/idle land to cropland. Analysis across 134 Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) further showed a large variation of agricultural evapotranspiration among and within GSAs, especially for tree crops, e.g., almond evapotranspiration ranging from 339 +- 80 mm yr-1 in Tracy to 1240 +- 136 mm yr-1 in Tri-County Water Authority. Continuous monitoring and assessment of the dynamics and spatial heterogeneity of agricultural evapotranspiration provide data-driven guidance for more effective land use and water planning across scales.