Water use is often studied at field or farm level. However, losses from irrigation can potentially be recycled, and water consumed by various agro-ecosystems will no longer be available for other water consumers in the basin. Because of these interactions, water use deserves to be studied at basin level. WaterWatch studied water depletion by evapotranspiration using SEBAL and satellite images from MODIS. The project demonstrates how monthly spatially distributed water use data can be obtained at the scale of entire river basin systems.

Major issues in water mangement in the Sirsa district in Northwestern India are water logging, salinization, and over-exploitation of ground water. The WATer PROductivity (WATPRO) project was started to identify the major agricultural water consumers and to estimate regional crop production. SEBAL in combination with MODIS and Landsat images was applied to obtain high resolution maps of water productivity. Water productivity shows the yield per unit of water depleted: crop per drop. Water productivity can also be expressed  as income per unit of water depleted: cash per splash.