Development of a gridded dataset of annual irrigation water withdrawal in China

Irrigated agriculture in China is of national and global significance. Official statistical data on agricultural water withdrawal might be more relevant to the actual water consumption in an agriculture sector than the irrigation requirements estimated from modeling studies. However, agricultural water withdrawal is always reported on the basis of geopolitical units or river basins, without spatial distribution information. Here, we developed a time series gridded datasets of annual irrigation water withdrawal in China from 1978 to 2008 by disaggregating the agricultural water withdrawal data from the geopolitical units to individual 1-km grids. This new dataset is the first to portray the spatially explicit distribution of actual water withdrawal in China. With this new dataset, we could better estimate and evaluate the crop yield, water stress, ground water decline, drought resistance, water use efficiency, and irrigation impact on the near surface climate in China.