Abstract

During the last decades, irrigation systems for pastures have been presented as a potential tool for paddock management, although evapotranspiration retrievals are still an asset and for preventing drought events. Thus, ET is a key parameter for determine water consumption of crops. In this work, we presented an evaluation of satellite-based models of pastures in the south of Chile. Datasets were setted up using remote sensing, automatic weather station and land surface cover maps. Four Surface Energy Balance (SEB) methods was calibrated: SEBS, SEBAL, METRIC and SSEBop for Actual Evapotranspiration (ETa) estimates. The SSEBop and SEBS show the best results such as RMSE equal to 0.74 and 1.1 mm day-1 respectively. This work contributes to complement the information of the prairies water footprint and irrigation scheduling using ETa satellite-based models for pastoral systems of Chile.