## 2 Materials and Methods
### Data  
The regions of interest used for land use classification were developed based on a series of field missions throughout the study area along with high-resolution Google Earth visualizations. A total of 88,546 pixels with a resolution of 10 m\({}^{2}\) was used for classification; 65% were used as reference data and 35% for the validation. The sampling was done in a random way; it was chosen to be representative and well distributed in the area. Figure 3 shows the field data used for this work. Weather data were collected for the study period of September 2018 to August 2019. These data included monthly mean rainfall, monthly average minimum temperature, monthly average maximum temperature, humidity (%), wind speed (m/s), and sunshine intensity (hours). Figure 4 shows climate data collected by the climate station at the Faculty of Science of Meknes, Moulay Ismail University, coordinates: Latitude: 33 deg52'11.12'' N, Longitude: 5 deg32'35.11'' W, Z = 554 m.  
For the satellite data, a total of 13 satellite images covering a whole crop year were used to carry out this work. All these images were obtained from the Sentinel-2 sensor of the European Space Agency ([[https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/sentinel-data-access](https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/sentinel-data-access)]([https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/sentinel-data-access](https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/sentinel-data-access)) (accessed on 15 August 2021)). This mission was launched in June 2015, with a revisit time (i.e., image interval) of 10 days and image spatial resolution of 10 m to 60 m in thirteen spectral bands from visible to mid-infrared. Images were downloaded from [[https://scihub.copernicus.eu/dhus/#/home](https://scihub.copernicus.eu/dhus/#/home)]([https://scihub.copernicus.eu/dhus/#/home](https://scihub.copernicus.eu/dhus/#/home)) (accessed on 15 August 2021) for the period August 2018-August 2019 (Table 1).  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline \hline
**Image** & **Acquisition Dates** \\ \hline
1 & 22 August 2018 \\
2 & 1 September 2018 \\
3 & 21 October 2018 \\
4 & 15 November 2018 \\
5 & 15 December 2018 \\
6 & 14 January 2019 \\
7 & 13 February 2019 \\
8 & 15 March 2019 \\
9 & 29 April 2019 \\
10 & 14 May 2019 \\
11 & 8 June 2019 \\
12 & 18 July 2019 \\
13 & 22 August 2019 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 1: Sentinel-2 satellite image acquisition dates.  
Figure 2: Ombrothermic diagram of the meteorological station at Meknes. Rainfall is mean monthly rain depth and temperature is mean monthly air temperature (1998–2018).  
requirements (Figure 5). The simulation was carried out on three parameters: potential evapotranspiration for the different crop types (ETc), effective rainfall (ER), and irrigation water requirements (IWR). These three parameters are dependent on each other. The ETc is the amount of water that should be transpired in a given time by the crop, while the ER is defined as the rainfall fraction that responds to the crops' water needs [43]. During the rainy months, rainfall covers the water requirements of the crops, while during the dry months, rainfall must be supplemented by irrigation water to cover water requirements.