Steven Quiring, professor of geography and principal investigator at the Byrd Polar and Research Center, is working to improve the accuracy and utility of national soil moisture and evapotranspiration products by integrating new data sources and downscaling them to individual farms across the continental United States.
Quiring, a climatologist and smart and resilient communities research lead at the Sustainability Institute at Ohio State, recently received a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to support this work. He discussed the details with the Byrd Center.
Q: What are you setting out to do?
A: This research addresses the critical need to enhance the accuracy and utility of national soil moisture and evapotranspiration products by integrating new data sources and downscaling them to farm-scale.
The goal is to provide soil moisture and evapotranspiration data at farm-scale (< 400 m) across the continental United States. We will be integrating data from in situ measurements, satellites and land surface models. The downscaling and blending of these datasets will use a variety of machine learning approaches.
This project builds on my National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-funded work that developed the National Soil Moisture Network. I will lead the soil moisture work at Ohio State, and the co-principal investigator, Vahid Rahmani, an assistant professor of biological and agricultural engineering at Kansas State University, will lead the evapotranspiration work there.
Q: Why is this project important?
A: This project specifically addresses the National Institute of Food and Agriculture Food and Agriculture Cyberinformatics and Tools initiative priorities by integrating disparate datasets and by building a scalable data infrastructure system for collecting, processing and distributing soil moisture and evapotranspiration data to agricultural producers, agribusinesses, natural resource managers and scientists.
These data are important for supporting on-farm decision making for applications such as precision agriculture and irrigation scheduling. They also are important for modeling crop yield, as well as insect and disease outbreaks. The results of this project will create substantial value for the U.S. agricultural enterprise.
We will disseminate the new soil moisture and evapotranspiration data in near-real-time.
Story originally published by the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center