WaPOR: database dissemination portal and APIs
The FAO portal to monitor Water Productivity through Open access of Remotely sensed derived data (WaPOR) monitors and reports on agriculture water productivity over Africa and the Near East.
It provides open access to the water productivity database and its thousands of underlying map layers, it allows for direct data queries, time series analyses, area statistics and data download of key variables associated to water and land productivity assessments.
The portal’s services are directly accessible through dedicated FAO WaPOR APIs, which will eventually be also available through the FAO API store
Water productivity assessments and other computation–intensive calculations are powered by Google Earth Engine.
A new version of the FAO portal to monitor Water Productivity through Open access of Remotely sensed derived data (WaPOR) is available as of June 2018.
Version 1 comes roughly one year after the launch of the Beta version of the portal, a period that allowed for a thorough revision of both the database and the portal. A methodology review workshop in January 2018 provided the opportunity to collectively prioritize improvements towards this and following versions of WaPOR. Taking into account the findings of the validation assessments carried out by different research institutions (IHE-DELFT, University of Twente) and feedback received from users, the team has defined the priorities for WaPOR 1.0, which resulted in the following improvements:
On the portal:
•Location search through coordinates or name of places;
•Personal area (MyWaPOR) for saving user preferences and accessing enhanced functionalities (work currently on-going);
•Improved interface usability and visual consistency;
•Low band width – friendly technology;
•Easier access to information and guidance documents.
On the data:
•Actual evapotranspiration now takes interception explicitly into account resulting in higher values in tropical areas compared to beta version;
•Evaporation, Transpiration and Interception are now calculated and made available separately;
•Improved algorithm for open water evaporation;
•Soil moisture calculations improved with regard to temperature (now using wet bulb temperature) and solar radiation (now using instantaneous transmissivity instead of daily average). This changes specifically lead to improved evapotranspiration values in arid areas.
•Reference evapotranspiration now takes into account wind speed at 2 m height.
The Beta version will not be updated and will be discontinued.