WATNEEDS

WATNEEDS is a dynamic spatially distributed agro-hydrological model for assessing agricultural crop water demand and green and blue water, under different climate scenarios, crop distribution alternatives and spatial scales. The model combines soil characteristics, climate data and plant parameters to solve the soil-water balance at a daily time step simulating the plants’ growth. Specifically, it quantifies the water that remains available as soil moisture thanks to precipitation (the so-called green water) and the missing water that should be applied to the plant with irrigation (named blue water). Outputs of WATNEEDS model provide information on the timing and the location of water needed to satisfy the plants’ demand under selected climate scenarios, land use, and agronomic inputs (irrigation and fertilizers).  

References

Chiarelli, D. D., Passera, C., Rosa, L., Davis, K. F., D’Odorico, P., & Rulli, M. C. (2020). The green and blue crop water requirement WATNEEDS model and its global gridded outputs. Scientific data, 7(1), 1-9.
D’Odorico, P., Davis, K. F., Rosa, L., Carr, J. A., Chiarelli, D., Dell’Angelo, J., … & Rulli, M. C. (2018). The global food‐energy‐water nexus. Reviews of geophysics, 56(3), 456-531.
Rosa, L., Chiarelli, D. D., Rulli, M. C., Dell’Angelo, J., & D’Odorico, P. (2020). Global agricultural economic water scarcity. Science Advances, 6(18), eaaz6031.
Liu, J., Yang, H., Cudennec, C., Gain, A. K., Hoff, H., Lawford, R., … & Zheng, C. (2017). Challenges in operationalizing the water–energy–food nexus. Hydrological Sciences Journal, 62(11), 1714-1720.