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Improvement of the Soil Moisture Diagnostic Equation for Estimating Root-Zone Soil Moisture

Soil moisture information can be used accurately in determining the timing and amount of irrigation applied to plants. Pan and Pan et al. proposed a robust and simple daily diagnostic equation for estimating daily soil moisture. The diagnostic equation evaluates the relationship between the soil moisture loss function and the summation weighted average of precipitation. The loss function uses the sinusoidal wave function which employs day of the year (DOY) to evaluate the seasonal variation in soil moisture loss for a given year. This was incorporated into the daily diagnostic equation to estimate the daily soil moisture for a location. Solar radiation is an energy source that drives the energy and water exchanges between vegetation and the atmosphere (i.e., evapotranspiration), and thus impacts the soil moisture dry-down. In this paper, two parameters (the actual solar radiation and the clear sky solar radiation) are introduced into loss function coefficient to improve the estimation of soil moisture. After the Introduction of the solar radiation data into soil moisture loss function, a slight improvement was observed in the estimated daily soil moisture. Pan observed that generally the correlation coefficient between the estimated and the observed soil moisture is above 0.75 and the root mean square error is below 5.0 (%v/v). The introduction solar radiation data (i.e. clear sky solar radiation and actual solar) improve the correlation coefficient average for all the sites evaluated by 0.03 when the root mean square error is generally below 4.5(%v/v) for the entire root zone.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:unt.edu/info:ark/67531/metadc1157607
Date05 1900
CreatorsOmotere, Olumide Olubunmi
ContributorsPan, Feifei, Hudak, Paul, Dong, Pinliang
PublisherUniversity of North Texas
Source SetsUniversity of North Texas
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis or Dissertation
Formatix, 67 pages, Text
RightsPublic, Omotere, Olumide Olubunmi, Copyright, Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights Reserved.

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