Exploring satellite soil moisture products for irrigation. A case study: Braila County, Romania

Irrigated agriculture will be impacted by climate change as average temperatures and rainfall variability increase. This trend will continue in the future, according to numerical experiments with climate models, but how it develops will be strongly influenced by the anthropogenic emission levels of greenhouse gases. However, the effects of climate change have not been, and will not be, uniform across regions or over time because human-induced warming is superimposed on natural climate variability (IPCC, 2021).

Recent studies (Caian et al., 2023) focused on the projected changes in extreme agro-climatic indicators reveal that Southern Romania appears as a regional hot-spot of climate change because the projected changes are higher and more accelerated than other regions of the country. In this context farmers will need to improve crop water allocation for sustainable irrigation as a measure of climate change adaptation.

Irrigation is the largest consumer in the agriculture sector and the efficient use of water is crucial in the next decades. Monitoring soil moisture will improve water allocation in space and time in irrigated agriculture. Braila County has the largest irrigated areas in Romania and efficient water allocation will mitigate the environmental issues related to water scarcity and soil degradation by salinization and erosion. According to the Koeppen-Geiger classification, the climate of this area is warm temperate humid with hot summers (Cfa) (Cheval et al., 2023). The mean annual precipitation is 450 mm, while the mean annual potential evapotranspiration exceeds 800 mm. The agro-climatic conditions require the use of irrigation in order to avoid crop losses and to ensure high crop productivity.

In this study, we focus on investigating the feasibility of satellite soil moisture products (AMSR-2, ASCAT, SMOS and SMAP) to derive amount of water applied for irrigation and the applicability of this approach to climatic and irrigation conditions specific to Braila County, Romania. 

This study has received funding from the European Union Agency for the Space Programme under the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101082189 (MAGDA project).