FAO: WaPOR database methodology - Version 2

Achieving food security in the future while using water resources in a sustainable manner is a major challenge for current and future generations. Agriculture is a key water user. A careful monitoring of water productivity in agriculture and exploring opportunities to increase it are required. Improving water productivity often represents the most important avenue to cope with increased water demand in agriculture. Systematic monitoring of water productivity through the use of Remote Sensing techniques can help to identify water productivity gaps and evaluate appropriate solutions to close these gaps.

The FAO portal to monitor Water Productivity through Open access of Remotely sensed derived data (WaPOR) provides access to 11 years of continued observations over Africa and the Near East. It gives open access to various spatial data layers related to land and water use for agricultural production and allows for direct data queries, time series analyses, area statistics and data download of key variables to estimate water and land productivity gaps in irrigated and rain fed agriculture.

WaPOR Version 2 was launched in June 2019 based on extensive internal and external validation and quality assessment. This publication describes the methodology used to produce the different data components of WaPOR Version 2 at the 250m (Level 1), 100m (Level 2) and 30m (Level 3) resolution, as made available through WaPOR version 2.0 release.

Check out the "WaPOR database methodology - version 2 release, April 20".