Soybeans, wheat, sugarbeets, corn. Nebraska is one of the biggest agricultural producers in the UNited States. Field to field, crop to crop, every farmer uses a different amount of water. How do we keep track of such diverse water use? The Landsat satellites gives us the ability to see individual fields. We can see what they are growing in each field and how much water is being consumed Its a great satellite that gives us so much information about our planet we use what we call surface energy balance. We know the amount of energy coming in from sunlight. Some of that energy is released as heat and measured by Landsat's infrared sensors. At the same time water from transpiration cools the surface, lowering the temperature of the fields and limiting the amount of heat seen by the thermal sensors. And we solve the energy balance for all these components. The energy balance then yields the ET which is the water that was consumed. We receive a monthly data set of metric ET data so we've got for May, June, July, August, September, we are getting inches of water used on the landscape so it covers the whole entire NRD Let's take an aerial view of this. Landsat measures the health of individual plants and the temperature of the land as we move into summer temperatures increase. Irrigated fields look cool because water evaporates from the soil and transpires from the plants. You cans ee ET peak middway through the growing season when corn needs the most water. By tracking monthly ET resource managers know how much water each field has used. The Central Platte Natural Resources District uses these measurements to plan their water budget. Wee need to maintain a balanced groundwater aquifer system. We don't want to deplete it. We don't want to overfill it because if we overfill it it runs out but, yeah, that's our goal. It's to maintain the large amount of irrigation we have here in the valley. and we need to do that on a sustanable basis. Metric, the system used to develop ET was developped in the early 2000s. Today it's being used by 15 states accross the United States. Water is important to this region and having this data now really helps us to use that water wisely. And make wise decisions