Projects Overview
Brief description of current and future projects are presented below.
Contents
WRF Hindcast
The WRF Hindcast project generates the input data used by the Grow Degree Calculator (GDC) and the Soil Moisture Estimator (SME) applications. WRF stands for Weather, Research, and Forecasting and is a program made available by UCAR/NCAR and other research participants. We use WRF to calculate a virtual weather station at a 3.3km resolution on an hourly basis for a given geographical sector.
This project is fully operational, and is the backbone of the GDC and SME applications. A Docker container package is available here and is meant for third party data contributions of geographical sectors.
Grow Degree Calculator
The Grow Degree Calculator project is based on the WRF Hindcast project and calculates the Grow Degree values for both crops and insects. Users can enter a location, a start and end date with lower and upper temps for the organism of interest. Output includes a text report, a plot of accumulated values over time, and an image the total accumulated values over the target sector. Click here to use the GDC application.
This project is fully operational, but requires studies to determine accuracy.
The GDC command line program is available here.
Soil Moisture Estimator
The Soil Moisture Estimator project is also based on the WRF Hindcast project and estimates the soil moisture at a given location. This is a more sophisticated program than the GDC as it requires crop and soil information provided by the user.
The standard reference evapotranspiration, ETo, is calculated on an hourly basis for a daily total. The ETo calculation is based on the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) method given in this paper and are not values calculated by the WRF model. The calculated ETo values and the WRF precipitation values give the atmospheric loads at the soil surface. These loads are presented to our implementation of the Sacramento Soil Moisture Accounting model for soil moisture estimation.
This project is fully operational, but requires studies to determine accuracy.
It is currently limited to parts of the western US. Third parties interested in contributing WRF data for a region of area can use the WRF_container above. Registration is required to submit data to Agrineer.org
The SME command line program is available here.
Soil Moisture Radar
The Soil Moisture Radar project implements a Software Defined Radio (SDR) bi-static radar, using GPS signals, to estimate soil moisture. GPS signals are ubiquitous and suited for top layer soil penetration. The difference between a signal that has reflected through the soil and one that has not gives an indicator of soil moisture. The signals to compare are derived from one antenna pointing up (direct and normal usage) with an antenna pointing down receiving the reflected signal.
This project is under development.
Soil Moisture TDR
The Soil Moisture TDR project implements a Software Defined Radio (SDR) to send a signal through the soil and reads the result to estimate soil moisture. This method is called Time Domain Reflectometry and can be used in concert with less expensive sensors to cover a large area.
This project is under development.
