Analysis of the energetic flows through the sebal application to the assessment of the actual evapotranspiration in a Napa Valley vineyard California (USA)

The use of water resources is constantly growing in agriculture industry and the reduction of the this resource is due by both anthropogenic and climate factors. Under this perspective it is necessary to develop monitoring systems able to forecast the consumption of water. The knowledge of the actual water demand of a crop is therefore strategic for the rational use of resources and to improve the quality of the crop production. Recent applications of remote sensing in agriculture provide a valuable contribution to release this purpose, besides the integration of remotely sensed data with measures retrieved by meteorological stations allows the development of models able to estimate the actual evapotranspiration (ETact) for a given crop. The purpose of this work was to calculate ETact in a vineyard, placed in Napa Valley (California, USA), by a energy balance model based on the analysis of remote sensed data from the Landsat 5 satellite during the 2008 wine production season.