  Citation: Al-Bakri, J.T.; D’Urso, G.; Batchelor, C.; Abukhalaf, M.; Alobeiaat, A.; Al-Khreisat, A.; Vallee, D. Remote Sensing-Based Agricultural Water Accounting for the North Jordan Valley. Water 2022, 14, 1198. https://doi.org/10.3390/ w14081198 Academic Editor: Xinchun Cao Received: 16 March 2022 Accepted: 6 April 2022 Published: 8 April 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). water Article Remote Sensing-Based Agricultural Water Accounting for the North Jordan Valley Jawad T. Al-Bakri 1, * , Guido D’Urso 2 , Charles Batchelor 3 , Motasem Abukhalaf 3 , Adel Alobeiaat 4 , Areej Al-Khreisat 1 and Domitille Vallee 3 1 Department of Land, Water and Environment, School of Agriculture, The University of Jordan, Amman 11942, Jordan; a.alkhreisat@ju.edu.jo 2 Department of Agricultural Sciences, University of Naples Federico II, 80055 Portici, Italy; durso@unina.it 3 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), FAO Regional Office for Near East and North Africa, 00153 Rome, Italy; batchelorch@gmail.com (C.B.); motasem.abukhalaf@fao.org (M.A.); domitille.vallee@fao.org (D.V.) 4 Ministry of Water and Irrigation, Amman 11183, Jordan; adel_alobeiaat@mwi.gov.jo * Correspondence: jbakri@ju.edu.jo; Tel.: +962-79-6169966 Abstract: Remote sensing can provide important and updated information for agricultural water accounting (AWA). In this study, data from the open-access portal (WaPOR) of the Food and Agri- cultural Organization was used in AWA to assess levels of agricultural water consumption and to provide possible solutions for water deficiency in the North Jordan Valley (NJV). Consolidated proce- dures have been applied to complement and validate the WaPOR products. These included the use of climatic and ground data, the multispectral remote-sensing data of Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8 to derive land use/cover maps, GIS layers, and calibrated evapotranspiration (ET) estimates using the surface energy balance algorithm for land (SEBAL). The data of water inflows and outflows were analyzed using the water accounting plus (WA+) system. Results showed that the WaPOR data of actual ET and interception (AETI) were highly correlated with SEBAL-ET, with WaPOR data overestimating ET for irrigated areas. Precipitation data from WaPOR, on the other hand, were underestimating inflow from rainfall, although significant correlations were observed between these data and rainfall records. As a result, the quality of WaPOR data affected the outputs from agricultural water accounting. The main impact on water accounting outputs was the underestimation of percolated water that could be utilized as a possible solution to water deficiency in the NJV. In addition, the water accounting performance indicators were relatively affected, although they reflected the nature of the study area where water deficiency predominated as a result of inter-basin transfer. The study compared outputs from water accounting in terms of the possible solutions to water deficiency in the NJV and concluded that considerable amounts of recoverable water could be developed when compared with the option of developing surface water from the side wadis. Also, it emphasized the important role of remote-sensing sources for providing information for AWA needed for improved water management and governance. Keywords: Jordan Valley; water accounting; WA+; FAO; WaPOR; remote sensing; SEBAL 1. Introduction Remote-sensing data provides important information for water resources management, particularly in Mediterranean countries where water resources are scarce. The progres- sive improvements in spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution of remote-sensing data made them invaluable sources of information for managing water resources at different scales [1–3]. The integration of remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS), as geospatial techniques, with ground data has become widely adopted in new tools for water-use assessment and reporting. A good example of these new reporting and full water Water 2022, 14, 1198. https://doi.org/10.3390/w14081198 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/water