The proposed ‘Smart Watering System’ will consist of 3 Stages (as a processing workflow shown in Figure 1) divided into 10 steps. The 3 Stages are defined as follows: (i) Input (Steps 1-3) (ii) Reading / Processing (Steps 4-7) and (iii) Output (Steps 8-10). The overall methodology consists of the following 10 steps:
1) development of a web-based platform where the end-users will login entering some useful inputs such as contact details and information related to their fields;
2) cross-check of input data;
3) unique ID-code for each end-user will be created referring to each ‘spot’ & crop-type;
4) automatically processing of Sentinel data (satellite /radar) to extract useful crop-parameters and transfer derived information to the ‘Reading/Processing Database’;
5) linked each ‘spot’ of interest to the closer available meteorological station and transfer the corresponding meteorological data to the ‘Reading/Processing Database’;
6) field measurements acquired at the same time with Sentinel overpasses (spectroradiometric, LAI, crop-height etc) which will be used for validation purposes and test of the predictive algorithm;
7) processing the readings of steps 4-6 using the FAO56 equation to estimate the water demand for irrigation;
8) development of a mobile-app aiming to inform each end-user for the daily irrigation demand of their fields. Each end-user will receive automatically a notification through the ‘CropWATER’ mobile-app referring to the water quantity requirements on a daily-basis;
9) development of the Smart ‘CropWATER’ Valve. Loaded with several sensors it will be able to read inputs data from the sms card, measure and release automatically the needed water quantity to ensure that the water demand calculated from the previous stages will finally ends up to the fields without any human intervention;
10) validation of the results / product.