The location of a significant part of the agricultural territories of Kazakhstan in the risk agriculture zone implies the development and further application of an objective monitoring system for irrigated territories. The purpose of the study was to develop methods for on-the-spot and long-term recognition of irrigated massifs and verification of methods in the conditions of the territories of southern Kazakhstan. The paper describes the methods of on-the-spot recognition of irrigated fields, the general assessment of irrigated areas for the growing season, as well as the method of recognizing promising areas for irrigation. The on-the-spot recognition of the fields is based on the use of such spectral indices as the Global Vegetation Moisture Index, Green Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, and the xanthophyll index, combined into a single system by the Decision Tree algorithm. The assessment of irrigated areas is based on differences in the physiological state of plants in conditions of normal water supply and plants experiencing a lack of moisture. The evaluation system includes the calculation of the temperature difference according to the corresponding satellite data and the calculation of the difference in vegetation indices for the same period. The difference in vegetation indices in irrigated fields has positive values due to a steady increase in green biomass, and the temperature difference, on the contrary, is negative or zero, since healthy plants, with normal water supply, actively evaporate moisture to maintain optimal temperatures of biochemical processes. To develop these methods, ground data from 2017-2021 were used. Verification of the methods with ground data demonstrated acceptable accuracy (87% in the on-the-spot assessment of irrigated fields; 60-90% in the general assessment of irrigated areas), while the methods have significant potential for further improvement.

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