KIMBERLY - Water expert Rick Allen keeps a close eye on southern Idaho's water - from about 400 miles in space.

Allen, a professor at the University of Idaho who works at the Kimberly Research and Extension Center, uses satellite images to gauge how much water gets sucked up by Magic Valley crops each irrigation season.

Surface and groundwater users rely on his analysis, and now NASA and the world will too. Allen was selected in October by NASA to serve on a 17-person advisory board that will help design the space agency's next image satellite, set to launch in 2011.

Allen returned last weekend from an advisory board meeting at EROS, the Earth Resources Observation Systems facility in Sioux Falls, S.D., where the team met to discuss the next satellite.

"Water is an acute problem coming under scrutiny across the West," he said. "Using satellites, we see the impact on the total water resource that comes when plants turn water into vapor. We can actually come up with an annual estimate of total water consumption."

Allen's goal, he said, is to make sure the next satellite has thermal imagery capabilities. Based on heat emitted from crops, Allen can tell how much water plants are using, and that information tells water users how to better manage irrigation systems.

The concept is called evapotranspiration: Allen measures how much water is evaporated from watersheds as well as crop fields.

But his research has other applications as well. He said that by using a satellite to measure evapotranspiration, armies can look at a satellite image and know if a land area is too wet for tanks.

However, the satellite Allen is working on - Landsat 8 - will be used primarily by the U.S. Geological Survey to measure geographic changes on Earth's surface.

Landsat 8 is extremely important, Allen said. The program's most-recent craft - Landsat 7, launched in 1999 - has technical glitches that limit its imaging capabilities. Now, researchers like Allen get images from a satellite launched in 1984. If Landsat 8 works, Allen could help NASA fast-forward satellite technology 27 years by the time it launches in 2011.

The information from Landsat 8 could be used immediately to help Magic Valley irrigators and water managers gauge water trends in Idaho's most precious - an increasingly scarce - natural resource.

Times-News staff writer Matt Christensen can be contacted at 735-3243 or at matt.christensen@lee.net.