Landsat-based Irrigation Dataset (LANID): 30-m resolution maps of irrigation distribution, frequency, and change for the U.S., 1997–2017

Abstract

Abstract. Data on irrigation patterns and trends at field-level detail across broad extents is vital for assessing and managing limited water resources. Until recently, there has been a scarcity of comprehensive, consistent, and frequent irrigation maps for the U.S. Here we present the new Landsat-based Irrigation Dataset (LANID), which is comprised of 30-m resolution annual irrigation maps covering the conterminous U.S. (CONUS) for the period of 1997–2017. The main dataset identifies the annual extent of irrigated croplands, pastureland, and hay for each year in the study period. Derivative maps include layers on maximum irrigated extent, irrigation frequency and trends, and identification of formerly irrigated areas and intermittently irrigated lands. Temporal analysis reveals that 38.5 million hectares of croplands and pasture/hay have been irrigated, among which the yearly active area ranged from ~22.6 to 24.7 million hectares. The LANID products provide several improvements over other irrigation data including field-level details on irrigation change and frequency, an annual time step, and a collection of ~10,000 visually interpreted ground reference locations for the eastern U.S. where such data has been lacking. Our maps demonstrated overall accuracy above 90 % across all years and regions, including in the more humid and challenging-to-map eastern U.S., marking a significant advancement over other products, whose accuracies ranged from 50 to 80 %. In terms of change detection, our maps yield per-pixel transition accuracy of 81 % and show good agreement with U.S. Department of Agriculture reports at both county and state levels. The described annual maps, derivative layers, and ground reference data provide users with unique opportunities to study local to nationwide trends, driving forces, and consequences of irrigation and encourage the further development and assessment of new approaches for improved mapping of irrigation especially in challenging areas like the eastern U.S. The annual LANID maps, derivative products, and ground reference data are available through https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5003976 (Xie et al., 2021).

HarvestGRID: High-resolution harvested crop areas of the United States from 1981 to 2019

“…Similarly, the gridded data product from this study (HarvestGRID) always aligns with the USDA-C (and mostly aligns with USDA) when aggregated to the county level. We note that harvested area records from USDA are considered to be of high quality, and are widely used to create sub-county level estimates [12,1] or to validate estimates derived from remote sensing [18,21], despite the occasional missing data as noted previously.…”

“…We obtained IF from remotely sensed data i.e. from CDL and Landsat-based National Irrigation Dataset (LANID, [21]) for cases where IF from USDA records is not available.…”

Influence of Irrigation on Diurnal Mesoscale Circulations: Results From GRAINEX

“…IOP 1 corresponds to the early growing period, when irrigation is limited, and IOP 2 occurs during the mid-growing season, which is characterized by vigorous crop growth and substantial irrigation. The GRAINEX domain (∼100 × 100 km) straddles the boundary between irrigated and non-irrigated croplands with irrigation being dominant west of longitude 96.9°W (Figure S1 in Supporting Information S1; Xie et al, 2021).…”