IDWR Wins National Award

Wednesday, September 16, 2009 9:18 AM CDT

The Idaho Department of Water Resources (IDWR) program, “Mapping Evapotranspiration from Satellites,” was one of six programs out of 700 entries nationwide to win a 2009 Innovations in American Government Award. The annual award is presented by the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University to honor exemplary service and creativity in the public sector at all levels of government in the United States.

The six award winners were announced Monday at a reception in Washington, D.C. The IDWR program, which was created in a partnership with the University of Idaho, joins a select group of 193 programs over 22 years that have received this honor.

IDWR and the University of Idaho will share a $40,000 grant towards disseminating the program around the nation.

Evapotranspiration (ET) is water that is transpired from the leaves of plants and evaporated from the soil. ET data is crucial for water management decisions because it represents the amount of water consumed by irrigated agriculture and other land uses.

ET from irrigated agriculture consumes more than 90 percent of the water used in Idaho, where nearly 3.4 million acres of land are irrigated.

ET is mapped using a model that computes ET from Landsat satellite images.

IDWR’s program provides accurate and repeatable ET data that can be computed down to the size of a field of crops. The program provides ET data that previously wasn’t available at such high resolution and is faster and more efficient to acquire and much less expensive than former methods.

The program has been a joint effort between IDWR and the University of Idaho with initial funding provided by NASA. Dr. Rick Allen at the University of Idaho developed the extensive computer algorithms needed to transform the satellite data into ET maps, while Tony Morse and Bill Kramber developed the applications at IDWR.

Over the past eight years, IDWR and the University of Idaho have developed important water resource applications based on ET data. IDWR now uses satellitebased ET data as primary input to hydrologic models, in water planning, to legally defend water rights decisions, and for managing endangered fish habitat.

IDWR’s program uses Landsat satellite images to compute and map ET because it is the only operational satellite with a high enough resolution to map ET at the field level and because it has the required thermal sensor. The University of Idaho and IDWR have already begun training and disseminating the knowledge gained from the program to water managers in other western states.

Video presentations explaining the Innovations in American Government Award

are available at the Ash Institute’s YouTube channel at:

http://www.youtube.com/ashinstitute

A direct link to IDWR’s presentation before the National Selection Committee in May 2009 is available at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNcZ8Ogk4zc

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