Landscape Water Requirement Satisfaction Index (L-WRSI) from 1982 to Present at Dekadal Time Scale

The Landscape Water Requirement Satisfaction Index (L-WRSI) is an extension of the well-established water requirement satisfaction index (WRSI), which is an indicator of crop performance based on the availability of water to the crop during a growing season, by including the entire landscape and not just crop growing regions. L-WRSI is created using components generated by the VegET model (Senay and others, 2023; Senay, 2008) and was developed to efficiently process and integrate readily available global weather and remote sensing datasets using water balance modeling techniques for monitoring rainfed agricultural systems. Reference evapotranspiration, a soil stress coefficient, and a phenology-based crop coefficient (based on the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) are used to determine daily soil moisture, runoff, and actual evapotranspiration using the root-zone (1 meter) as a control volume to implement a daily soil water balance accounting. The VegET model includes the incorporation of snowpack and snowmelt processes and the separation of runoff into surface runoff and deep drainage.
Map graphics of L-WRSI and L-WRSI anomaly (percent median based on the long-term median of 40 years (1982-2021)), as well as anomaly raster data (geotiff format) are provided at https://earlywarning.usgs.gov/fews/product/960.