IrriWatch

IrriWatch is Hydrosat's satellite-based platform for irrigation planning, water accounting and irrigation performance evaluation, used by growers, agribusinesses, irrigation districts and water authorities. Field sensors and probes give point readings that need installation and calibration, and vegetation indices such as NDVI only show water stress once damage is visible. IrriWatch instead measures crop and soil temperature from thermal infrared satellite imagery and applies Hydrosat's SEBAL surface energy balance model to each 10 m pixel, together with visible and near-infrared bands and weather data, to estimate daily evapotranspiration, soil moisture and crop growth without field sensors. Inputs come from Hydrosat's own VanZyl-1 and VanZyl-2 thermal satellites together with publicly available thermal and multispectral satellites.

The platform has three modules:

• Advisor: daily soil moisture and crop growth alerts per field, a 7-day irrigation planner and history back to 2018.
• Tracking: monitoring of applied and consumed water from field to basin, with data export for regulatory reporting and audits.
• Performance: evaluation of irrigation adequacy, efficiency, reliability, equity and water productivity across schemes, districts and regions.

Tracking and Performance are currently offered through a demo and a waitlist. Results are delivered through a web portal, iOS and Android apps, CSV, Excel and JSON downloads, and an OAuth2 REST API that returns field averages as JSON and pixel maps as GeoTIFF. Hydrosat reports more than 2 million hectares monitored daily in over 60 countries. In 2026 Madera County, California renewed a three-year contract for daily field-level crop water use monitoring across about 220,000 acres in support of groundwater sustainability (SGMA) compliance. Other named users include the Brabantse Delta Water Board in the Netherlands, Smart Agro Hub in Greece and Irritec Mexico. Hydrosat states that Wageningen University & Research validated IrriWatch soil moisture for potatoes in 2022.