GeoWRSI

Geo-spatial Water Requirements Satisfaction Index

GeoWRSI
GeoWRSI Toolbar
Original author(s)	Tamuka Magazdire
Developer(s)	USGS
Stable release	v3.0
Operating system	OSX, Windows
Website	CHG GeoWRSI

GeoWRSI stands for Geo-spatial Water Resource Satisfaction Index. It was developed primarily by Tamuka Magadzire, a CHG field scientist in Botswana.

What is GeoWRSI?

The GeoWRSI is a geo-spatial, stand-alone implementation of the Water Requirements Satisfaction Index (GeoWRSI), as it is implemented by the USGS for the FEWSNET Activity. The program runs a crop-specific water balance model for a selected region in the world, using raster data inputs. The program produces a range of outputs which can either be used qualitatively to help assess and monitor crop conditions during the crop growing season, or can be regressed with yields to produce yield estimation models and yield estimates. Other tools are available to post-process the GeoWRSI outputs and develop yield estimation models.

Program Outputs

The GeoWRSI Toolbar

• WRSI Map
• WRSI Anomaly Map
• Start of Season Map
• Total Actual Evapotranspiration at different stages of crop growth
• Total Water Deficit at different stages of crop growth
• Total Water Requirement at different stages of crop growth
• Total Surplus Water at different stages of crop growth
• Maximum Water Deficit experienced in any one dekad
• Maximum Surplus Water experienced in any one dekad

Other Functions

The GeoWRSI has several other functions for facilitating agrometeorological analysis for seasonal monitoring. These include:

• Merging satellite rainfall estimates and rain gauge data to produce improved rainfall data
• Rainfall summations and percent-of-average calculations over user-selected time periods
• Estimation of yield using regression analysis with water balance parameters
• Climatological analysis of rainfall, WRSI and Start of Season (average, median, standard deviation, trends etc)
• GIS type functions including:
  • displaying of spatial data, primarily ESRI bils and shapefiles
  • extracting statistics from raster datasets aggregated over vector regions

Download

You can download the GeoWRSI Installation File here.

Data

Rainfall and evapotranspiration data are updated regularly at the GeoWRSI data archives.

Bug reports

Report bugs here

Feature requests

Make your requests for new and added features here. We cannot commit to fulfilling every feature request, but these new requested features will be at least considered for the next version.