Irrigation and Water Use Reporting in the Tennessee Valley Region of Alabama
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Irrigation and Water Use Reporting in the Tennessee Valley Region of Alabama by Jarrett Roland A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science Auburn, Alabama August 3, 2019 Keywords: Irrigation, Water Resources, Sustainability, Water Use, GIS, Tennessee River Valley Copyright 2019 by Jarrett Roland Approved by: Dr. Philip Chaney, Chair, Associate Professor of Geosciences Dr. Stephanie Shepherd, Assistant Professor of Geosciences Dr. Christopher Burton, Assistant Professor of Geosciences Abstract Irrigation is the largest consumptive use of water in the United States. Accurate monitoring of water use for irrigation is critical for a state to sustainably manage its water resources. Federal programs provide valuable information for states to utilize, but individual states may develop their own program to supplement those federal programs. In 1993, Alabama passed the Water Resources Act, requiring irrigators with the capacity to withdraw more than 100,000 gallons per day to apply for a Certificate of Beneficial Use (COU) with Alabama’s Office of Water Resources for each pump that is withdrawing water and report their use annually. Recent studies have revealed issues with the effectiveness of Alabama’s COU program. This study investigated CP irrigation in the Tennessee Valley region in northern Alabama for the years 2011 to 2015 to determine whether CP irrigators were applying for COUs and reporting water use as required by the program. The study found that CP irrigation increased substantially (194 to 324; +67.0%) for the study period. However, the number of pumps registered for irrigators did not change (77) throughout the study period. Furthermore, an attempt to connect CP irrigation sites to their appropriate COU was not possible due to issues with quality control on data collection. The results of the study are compared to the Wiregrass region in southeastern Alabama to build towards a comprehensive understanding of the effectiveness of Alabama’s COU program. ii Acknowledgements Thank you to Dr. Chaney, for being my mentor and advisor for the last several years, and for no small amount of patience. With his help and guidance I have been able to accomplish far more than I could have ever expected when I first became a student of geography. Thank you to my committee members, Dr. Burton and Dr. Shepherd. Both of them have been outstanding professional role models in and out of the classroom. I sincerely hope that I can bring the same level of passion and integrity to my work as I have witnessed from all of my committee members. I would also like to thank my graduate school colleagues in Geosciences, and the Auburn community as a whole. I am extremely grateful for the opportunities that I had to get to know such wonderfully kind and intelligent people, and have been greatly impacted by their upstanding behavior. Thank you to my family, for supporting me and encouraging me to do the right thing at every step of the way. iii Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii List of Tables ................................................................................................................................. vi List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... vii Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2: Irrigation Water Use Monitoring .................................................................................. 3 Federal Water Monitoring Programs .......................................................................................... 3 State Water Use Reporting and Metering Programs ................................................................... 4 GIS and Remote Sensing for Water Monitoring ......................................................................... 6 Alabama’s Certificate of Beneficial Use (COU) Water Use Reporting Program ...................... 7 Chapter 3: Study Area - Tennessee Valley ..................................................................................... 9 Chapter 4: Research Methods ....................................................................................................... 11 Inventory of Center Pivot Irrigation Systems ........................................................................... 14 Identifying Center Pivot Owners .............................................................................................. 16 Proximity Analysis of Center Pivots and Pumps ...................................................................... 17 Matching Center Pivots with Pumps......................................................................................... 18 Compliance and Water Use Analysis ....................................................................................... 18 iv Chapter 5: Results and Discussion ................................................................................................ 20 Center Pivot Systems and COUs in the Tennessee Valley ....................................................... 20 Comparison of Center Pivot Growth in the Tennessee Valley and Wiregrass Regions ........... 23 Proximity Analysis of Center Pivots and COUs ....................................................................... 24 Center Pivot Systems Matched with Pumps in the Tennessee Valley ...................................... 25 Comparison of Center Pivot and Pump Matching for the Tennessee Valley and Wiregrass ... 26 Water Use Reporting Compliance for the Tennessee Valley ................................................... 28 Comparison of Water Use Reporting in the Tennessee Valley and Wiregrass ........................ 29 Accuracy Assessment of the Tennessee Valley Water Use Reporting ..................................... 30 Chapter 6: Summary and Conclusions .......................................................................................... 32 Recommendations for Alabama’s COU Program..................................................................... 35 Literature Cited ............................................................................................................................. 36 Appendix 1: Center Pivot Identification ....................................................................................... 40 Appendix 2: Comparison of Center Pivots in the Tennessee Valley and Wiregrass .................... 45 Appendix 3: Buffer Analysis of Center Pivots in the Tennessee Valley and Wiregrass .............. 47 Appendix 4: COU Water Use Data Tables ................................................................................... 54 v List of Tables Table 1: Land use land cover percentage (%) by county. The land cover statistics have been computed form the National Land Cover Dataset 2011. Source: Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium (2018). ...................................................................................... 10 Table 2: Example Certificate of Use (COU) data provided by the Alabama Office of Water Resources. ............................................................................................................................. 11 Table 3: Duplicate location reporting for COU Holders with multiple COU............................... 18 Table 4: Number of CPs identified in each region for each year and corresponding acres. ......... 23 Table 5: Percent change in CPs and CP acres for each region ..................................................... 24 Table 6: Compliance indicators for the Tennessee Valley and Wiregrass regions. ...................... 30 vi List of Figures Figure 1: Tennessee Valley Study Area.......................................................................................... 9 Figure 2: General study methodology outline. ............................................................................. 12 Figure 3: Detailed study workflow. .............................................................................................. 13 Figure 4: 2011 NAIP imagery of the Tennessee Valley region of Alabama. ............................... 15 Figure 5: Pivot polygons (blue) overlaid on tax parcel data (grey for Madison County. ............. 16 Figure 6: Change in CPs from 2011 (blue) to 2013 (red). ............................................................ 21 Figure 7: Change in CPs from 2013 (blue) to 2015 (red). ............................................................ 21 Figure 8: Change in CPs from 2011 (blue) to 2015 (red). ............................................................ 21 Figure 9: Number of CPs and corresponding acres for the three study years. .............................. 22 Figure 10: Only two CPs moved from 2011 (blue) to 2013 (red). ............................................... 22 Figure 11: Distance of all CPs in the Tennessee Valley and Wiregrass from the nearest pump in 2015....................................................................................................................................... 25 Figure 12: Total number of CPs and associated acres matched to COU