Westcoast - Blog Posts

Watching Water in the West

If you’ve eaten a piece of fruit, a vegetable, or a handful of nuts in the past week, it’s very likely they all came from “America’s Salad Bowl.” California’s Central Valley and Central Coast is where more than one-third of all vegetables in the U.S. are grown––and two-thirds of our fruits and nuts.

Keeping this area fertile takes a lot of water, and we provide farmers with NASA data that helps them manage increasingly scarce supplies. Working with farmers and conservation groups, we developed a new website called OpenET to transform how water is managed in the West! It covers 17 western U.S. states, putting satellite and other Earth science data into their hands. The website gives them daily and monthly views of water usage, down to the resolution of a single field of vegetables.

The ET in OpenET doesn’t stand for extraterrestrial, but “evapotranspiration.” Evapotranspiration is a measurement that farmers can use to estimate the amount of water being used by their fields and crops. This water will usually need to be replaced through irrigation or rainfall.

We work closely with partners and people around the world, connecting them with NASA Earth data to solve our planet’s most pressing issues.

Learn more about our Applied Sciences program, here! We are Earth. Science. Action.

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