Spatial Science Commons^™

Field-Scale Soil Moisture Bridges The Spatial-Scale Gap Between Drought Monitoring And Agricultural Yields, Noemi Vergopolan, Sitian Xiong, Lyndon Estes, Niko Wanders, Nathaniel W. Chaney, Eric F. Wood, Megan Konar, Kelly Caylor, Hylke E. Beck, Nicolas Gatti, Tom Evans, Justin Sheffield

Geography

Soil moisture is highly variable in space and time, and deficits (i.e., droughts) play an important role in modulating crop yields. Limited hydroclimate and yield data, however, hamper drought impact monitoring and assessment at the farm field scale. This study demonstrates the potential of using field-scale soil moisture simulations to support highresolution agricultural yield prediction and drought monitoring at the smallholder farm field scale. We present a multiscale modeling approach that combines HydroBlocks a physically based hyper-resolution land surface model (LSM) with machine learning. We used HydroBlocks to simulate root zone soil moisture and soil temperature in Zambia at 3 …