Irrigation Demand Calculator

Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District is a water district in the Central San Joaquin Valley, California - a prime spot for citrus fruits with nearly 10,000 acres of cultivated land. The district operates within a challenging area characterized by intricate jurisdictional, geological, and hydrological factors, which pose significant challenges in delivering water to the local growers. The project entailed calculating the irrigation needs of district's agricultural fields to estimate total groundwater extraction, which supplements surface water deliveries tracked at a granular field level.

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My work includes:

• Spearheaded the development of a tool to compute crop irrigation demands using Integrated Water Flow Model Demand Calculator (IDC).

• Geospatially modeled field level land use data from different databases (LandIQ, DWR, USDA) involving 15+ crop types in the district.

• Leveraged geospatial datasets to produce a database of soil and aquifer properties at an individual farm parcel level.

• Created an algorithm to normalize OpenET historical ensemble evapotranspiration data using trends observed in the current LandIQ dataset.

• Developed a Python code to compute surface water and groundwater usage in each parcel in the district by translating calculated crop demands from IDC.

• Visualized crop-wise root-zone fluxes like infiltration, evapotranspiration, applied water etc. using modeled output from IDC.

• Developed a suite of codes and workflows in Python for model input file generation, workflow optimization, large dataset processing.