Assessing Daily Evapotranspiration Methodologies from One-Time-of-Day sUAS and EC Information in the Project.

Daily evapotranspiration ( ) plays a key role in irrigation water management and is particularly important in drought-stricken areas, such as California and high-value crops. Remote sensing allows for the cost-effective estimation of spatial evapotranspiration (), and the advent of small unmanned aerial systems () technology has made it possible to estimate instantaneous high-resolution at the plant, row, and subfield scales. estimates using "instantaneous" remote sensing measurements with half-hourly/hourly forcing micrometeorological data, yielding hourly fluxes in W/m that are then translated to a daily scale (mm/day) under two assumptions: (a) relative rates, such as the ratios of -to-net radiation ( ) or -to-solar radiation ( ), are assumed to be constant rather than absolute, and (b) nighttime evaporation () and transpiration () contributions are negligible. While assumption (a) may be reasonable for unstressed, full cover crops (no exposed soil), the and rates may significantly vary over the course of the day for partially vegetated cover conditions due to diurnal variations of soil and crop temperatures and interactions between soil and vegetation elements in agricultural environments, such as vineyards and orchards. In this study, five existing extrapolation approaches that compute the daily from the "instantaneous" remotely sensed estimates and the eddy covariance () flux tower measurements were evaluated under different weather, grapevine variety, and trellis designs. Per assumption (b), the nighttime contribution was ignored. Each extrapolation technique (evaporative fraction (), solar radiation ( ), net radiation-to-solar radiation ( ) ratio, Gaussian (), and Sine) makes use of clear skies and quasi-sinusoidal diurnal variations of hourly and other meteorological parameters. The estimates and measurements were collected over multiple years and times from different vineyard sites in California as part of the USDA Agricultural Research Service Grape Remote Sensing Atmospheric Profile and Evapotranspiration eXperiment (). Optical and thermal imagery data at 10 cm and 60 cm, respectively, were collected by the Utah State University Program and used in the Two-Source Energy Balance () model to estimate the instantaneous or hourly at overpass time. The hourly from the measurements was also used to validate the extrapolation techniques. Overall, the analysis using measurements indicates that the , , and approaches presented the best goodness-of-fit statistics for a window of time between 1030 and 1330 PST (Pacific Standard Time), with the approach yielding better agreement with the measurements. Similar results were found using and data. The 1030-1330 time window also provided the greatest agreement between the actual daily and the extrapolated daily , with the approach again yielding better agreement with the ground measurements. The expected accuracy of the upscaled daily estimates across all vineyard sites in California is below 0.5 mm/day, ( extrapolation accuracy was found to be 0.34 mm/day), making the daily scale results from reliable and suitable for day-to-day water management applications.