Remote Sensing Based Irrigation And Drainage Management System For Namakkal District

Abstract Irrigation is one of the most important inputs for an efficient and sustainable agricultural production. Thus the subject of efficient irrigation water management has been the talk of the last few decades. It has been emphasized that proper monitoring and evaluation is the key to successful management. Irrigation management in the most projects has so far been essentially water supply based. The dynamics of crop water demands are not explicitly considered. Consequently, irrigation systems do not supply the right quantities of water at the right time. Irrigation experts are seeking the ways in which the water is used very efficiently. The first step of this achievement is to increase in effectiveness of irrigation management. Analyzing large amount of data is necessity for management of irrigation projects. Data must be collected, stored and interrelated with each other in such a way that the data are readily accessible. The aim of this study is to present a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for Namakkal irrigation and drainage project located in the southern west of Tamilnadu. GIS was developed to provide a powerful tool to analyze large volumes of geographic data. It stores a considerable amount of spatial information in a compact and accessible form and it has the ability to work with spatial and non-spatial data and create information by integrating data layers. In this work, several layers of information such as: canals, drainage system, landuse, farms, groundwater surface level, etc have been imported or created in ArcGIS. In addition, several scripts have been developed to calculate the irrigation requirements and necessary results.