MODIS Irrigated Agriculture

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Irrigated Agriculture Dataset for the United States (MIrAD-US) suite of irrigation products was developed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center. The goal of MIrAD is to provide a comprehensive and consistently processed geospatial dataset for irrigated agriculture across the conterminous U.S. (CONUS). MIrAD Version 4 offers irrigation datasets for 2002, 2007, 2012, and 2017 at 250-m and 1-km spatial resolutions.

We have employed a geospatial modeling approach and implemented it for four time periods (2002, 2007, 2012, and 2017) to consistently map irrigated agriculture across the conterminous U.S. These data can be used to help assess water-quality trends in ground and surface waters, explain drought impacts on vegetation, and support the application and refinement of current water volumes used for irrigation.

The method incorporated the following three primary data inputs:

1. USDA county-level irrigation irrigated area statistics (https://www.nass.usda.gov/AgCensus/index.php)

2. Annual peak Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) derived from Collection 6 Aqua MODIS imagery (https://aqua.nasa.gov/modis)

3. A land cover mask for agricultural lands derived from NLCD (https://www.mrlc.gov/)

A detailed description of the input data and methodology is provided by Pervez and Brown (2010).

References:

Pervez MS, Brown JF. Mapping Irrigated Lands at 250-m Scale by Merging MODIS Data and National Agricultural Statistics. Remote Sensing. 2010; 2(10):2388-2412. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs2102388.