Assessing the potentialities of FORMOSAT-2 data for water and crop monitoring at small regional scale in South-Eastern France

Water monitoring at the scale of a small agricultural region is a key point to insure a good crop development particularly in South-Eastern France, where extreme climatic conditions result in long dry periods in spring and summer with very sparse precipitation events, corresponding to a crucial period of crop development. Remote sensing with the increasing imagery resolution is a useful tool to provide information on plant water status over various temporal and spatial scales. The current study focussed on assessing the potentialities of FORMOSAT-2 data, characterized by high spatial (8m pixel) and temporal resolutions (1-3 day/time revisit), to improve crop modeling and spatial estimation of the main land properties. Thirty cloud free images were acquired from March to October 2006 over a small region called Crau-Camargue in SE France, while numerous ground measurements were performed simultaneously over various crop types. We have compared two models simulating energy transfers between soil, vegetation and atmosphere: SEBAL and PBLs. Maps of evapotranspiration were analyzed according to the agricultural practices at field scale. These practices were well identified from FORMOSAT-2 images, which provided accurate input surface parameters to the SVAT models.