In water-scarce regions, precipitation is a highly variable and essential resource for crop production. Developing countries like India have an uneven distribution of rain gauges, so reliance on satellite and reanalysis-based precipitation products is critical for their prudent management. Hence, the study statistically evaluated different precipitation products against the station data for water-scarce regions in Tamil Nadu and found that ERA5-Land performed the best, followed by MSWEP.

Growing water scarcity in agriculture is an increasing problem and future climate predictions enhance drought risks for agricultural production. For assessing irrigation as a measure to increase agricultural water security a generalized stochastic approach for a spatial distributed estimation of future irrigation water demand is proposed, which ensures safe yields and a high water productivity at the same time.