Copernicus satellites for supporting irrigation and water management in Australia: the COALA H2020 Project.

COALA is a project funded by the Horizon 2020 program of the European Union with the aim of developing Copernicus Earth Observation-based information services for irrigation and nutrient management in Australia, building on consolidated experience of past EU projects and existing operational irrigation advisory services. Earth Observation-based services can provide “diagnostic” data and information relevant for integrated input management of irrigation water and nutrients, from subplot level to irrigation scheme or river basin levels.

COALA, started on January 2020, is developing Copernicus-based information service for the Australian agricultural systems, based on strong collaboration with Academic Australian institutions and business players. COALA services will provide to farmers, irrigation organisation and basin authorities information about crops development, water and nutrient status, irrigated areas by means of innovative algorithms based on Sentinel Earth Observation data, which will be accessed by means of the new cloud platforms (DIAS) of Copernicus. In-situ and other source of data, such as ground soil moisture probes, meteorological stations and Numerical Weather Prediction models, will be used to improve the information provided to the final users.

The advancements beyond the state of art of COALA methodologies for managing irrigation are:

COALA will demonstrate that Copernicus data and new DIAS infrastructure can greatly improve the availability of a multi-scale information product shared by the different levels of users. The innovative approach achieves a "converging loop procedure" between water authority, irrigation infrastructure operation and farmers, enabling transparency in all the decision taken at all levels and improving the accuracy of estimation of actual water use.

https://www.coalaproject.eu/