From Space To Field [OpenET]
Putting satellite insights into growers’ hands
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https://irrigationtoday.org/features/from-space-to-field/ <-- shared technical media article
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https://etdata.org/ <-- shared OpenET home page
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https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/openet-satellite-based-water-data-resource/ <-- shared NASA technical article
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^^^^ shared OpenET overview video
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“OpenET is an online water platform that aims to fill the biggest data gap in water management. OpenET makes satellite-based data on water consumed by crops and other vegetation widely available in 17 states in the western United States….”
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“While scientists have been working on satellite-based approaches for mapping evapotranspiration (ET) for more than 30 years, the data have historically been difficult for agricultural producers and irrigation professionals to access…
To address this data gap, a team of scientists and software engineers from NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and multiple U.S. universities have worked for the past eight years to develop a fully automated system for producing and distributing satellite-based ET data for the United States.
The system, OpenET, uses satellite observations from Landsat and other satellites in combination with gridded meteorological data to calculate ET at daily, monthly, seasonal and annual timescales using six well-established, satellite-driven ET models, computing a single ET value for every location and time step.
OpenET, an open science effort…, was developed to address the lack of easily accessible, consistent and reproducible information on ET by making it freely available via multiple open data services…
The data are freely available to the public and increasingly being used by U.S. agricultural producers and water managers to improve the reliability of water supplies for agricultural production.
The data provided by OpenET offers measurements of the amount of water moving from soil and plants into the atmosphere as water vapor, along with information on the health of crops and other vegetation…
Areas with more ET have more evaporative cooling and lower land surface temperatures, while areas with less ET have higher land surface temperatures.
“These patterns are clearly evident in satellite imagery of land surface temperature in places like the arid western U.S., with wetlands and well-irrigated agricultural fields standing out against the surrounding landscape during the growing season,” says [the lead researcher]. “Scientists use physically based models to combine satellite observations of land surface temperature, along with additional satellite measurements of vegetation extent and condition, with gridded weather data to compute ET for every pixel in a satellite image.”
[In] March [2025], OpenET released the OpenET FARMS mobile-friendly user interface — designed in partnership with more than 50 agricultural producers and ag-tech companies — to make OpenET data even more accessible and easy to use for the agricultural and water resources management communities.
Users can view or download data in multiple formats to increase field usability for select regions of interest, time periods and variables, and create automated recurring…
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