NASA Helps Agriculture Community During Current California Drought

We've spoken in great deal about those astronauts up in the International Space Station. But aside from their contributions to the space program, have we really elaborated on their contributions to the world?

Astronauts and satellites have the ability to see certain details from space, such as weather patterns, and detect issues before they actually occur. A recent matter at hand has been the prevalence of droughts, specifically in California. Astronauts aboard the ISS can actually see that 2014 could very well be one of the driest years in California's history.

How can they determine this? The astronauts can see the behavior of the oceans from space, which is relative to the onset of droughts, along with hurricanes, typhoons, floods, and other storms. The tides of the oceans provide insight toward the onset of rain and snow, and NASA satellite information provided by the Terrestrial Observation and Prediction System (TOPS), NASA Earth Exchange (NEX), and Satellite Irrigation Management Support (SIMS) is in the process of helping farmers prepare for the upcoming drought as the warmer weather approaches.

These technologies are providing California growers with valuable information such as irrigation management, monitoring crop development, and on-farm water use efficiency. The California Department of Water Resources (CDWR) is using NASA's information to notify irrigation managers of water requirements for their crops as the drought season draws nearer.

Forrest Melton is a senior research scientist for California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) and the Cooperative for Earth Science Research and Technology at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. He's getting the best of both worlds by being in California to understand the weather conditions and working for NASA, which is providing him with the information his state needs to improve crop conditions.

"Our goal is to find new ways to make satellite and weather information both highly useful and easily available to growers in California and across the western U.S.," he said in this Product Design & Development article. "We want to support farmers in improving on-farm water management and help water managers plan and mitigate the impacts of drought."

The drought season is only a couple of months away, but farmers and irrigation managers should be prepared thanks to this plentiful information provided by NASA and the CDWR.