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Doro, L., Jones, C., Williams, J. R., Norfleet, M. L., Izaurralde, R. C., Wang, X., et al. (2017). The Variable Saturation Hydraulic Conductivity Method for Improving Soil Water Content Simulation in EPIC and APEX Models. Vadose Zone Journal, 16(13).
Abstract: Soil water percolation is a key process in the life cycle of water in fields, watersheds, and river basins. The Environmental Policy Integrated Climate (EPIC) and the Agricultural Policy/Environmental eXtender (APEX) are continuous models developed for evaluating the environmental effects of agricultural management. Traditionally, these models have simulated soil water percolation processes using a tipping-bucket approach, with the rate of flow limited by the saturated hydraulic conductivity. This simple approach often leads to inaccuracy in simulating elevated soil water conditions where soil water content (SWC) levels may remain above field capacity under prolonged wet weather periods or limited drainage. To overcome this deficiency, a new sub-model, the variable saturation hydraulic conductivity (VSHC) method, was developed for simulating soil water percolation processes using a nonlinear equation to estimate the effective hydraulic conductivity as a function of the SWC and soil properties. The VSHC method was evaluated at three sites in the United States and two sites in Europe. In addition, a numerical solution of the Richards equation was used as a benchmark for SWC comparison. Results show that the VSHC method substantially improves the accuracy of the SWC simulation in long-term simulations, particularly during wet periods. At the watershed scale, results on the Riesel Y2 watershed indicate that the VSHC method enhances model performance in the high-flow regime of channel peak flows because of the improved estimation of SWC, which implies that the improved SWC simulation at the field scale is beneficial to hydrologic modeling at the watershed scale.
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Mansouri, M., Dumont, B., Leemans, V., & Destain, M. - F. (2014). Bayesian methods for predicting LAI and soil water content. Precision Agric., 15(2), 184–201.
Abstract: LAI of winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and soil water content of the topsoil (200 mm) and of the subsoil (500 mm) were considered as state variables of a dynamic soil-crop system. This system was assumed to progress according to a Bayesian probabilistic state space model, in which real values of LAI and soil water content were daily introduced in order to correct the model trajectory and reach better future evolution. The chosen crop model was mini STICS which can reduce the computing and execution times while ensuring the robustness of data processing and estimation. To predict simultaneously state variables and model parameters in this non-linear environment, three techniques were used: extended Kalman filtering (EKF), particle filtering (PF), and variational filtering (VF). The significantly improved performance of the VF method when compared to EKF and PF is demonstrated. The variational filter has a low computational complexity and the convergence speed of states and parameters estimation can be adjusted independently. Detailed case studies demonstrated that the root mean square error of the three estimated states (LAI and soil water content of two soil layers) was smaller and that the convergence of all considered parameters was ensured when using VF. Assimilating measurements in a crop model allows accurate prediction of LAI and soil water content at a local scale. As these biophysical properties are key parameters in the crop-plant system characterization, the system has the potential to be used in precision farming to aid farmers and decision makers in developing strategies for site-specific management of inputs, such as fertilizers and water irrigation.
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Mansouri, M., & Destain, M. - F. (2015). Predicting biomass and grain protein content using Bayesian methods. Stoch. Environ. Res. Risk Assess., 29(4), 1167–1177.
Abstract: This paper deals with the problem of predicting biomass and grain protein content using improved particle filtering (IPF) based on minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence. The performances of IPF are compared with those of the conventional particle filtering (PF) in two comparative studies. In the first one, we apply IPF and PF at a simple dynamic crop model with the aim to predict a single state variable, namely the winter wheat biomass, and to estimate several model parameters. In the second study, the proposed IPF and the PF are applied to a complex crop model (AZODYN) to predict a winter-wheat quality criterion, namely the grain protein content. The results of both comparative studies reveal that the IPF method provides a better estimation accuracy than the PF method. The benefit of the IPF method lies in its ability to provide accuracy related advantages over the PF method since, unlike the PF which depends on the choice of the sampling distribution used to estimate the posterior distribution, the IPF yields an optimum choice of this sampling distribution, which also utilizes the observed data. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in terms of estimation accuracy, root mean square error, mean absolute error and execution times.
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