Overview

Optimizing crop water usage efficiency and maintaining water sustainability are challenging under rapidly changing natural conditions. Spurred by the high economic value of wine-grape production in California, the increasing acreage of vineyards and their irrigation requirements pose a challenge given limited irrigation water availability and policies devoted to ensuring sustainable groundwater management. Therefore, this project aims at monitoring the root-zone soil moisture in near real-time for multiple California vineyards to help support irrigation management strategies An accurate characterization of the time/space heterogeneity in root-zone soil moisture at the sub-field-scale (30-m) can be used to optimize the irrigation management, improve wine-grape yield, and quality. A land data assimilation system is deployed to integrate soil moisture information obtained from high-resolution thermal infrared and radar remote sensing into a 30-m soil water balance model. Near-real-time root-zone soil moisture imageries provided by this data assimilation system have been delivered to the vineyard managers for supporting specific irrigation scheduling decisions.

Funding

This work was supported by funds from the NASA Applied Sciences – Water Resources Program grant no. 80NSSC19K1245: High-Resolution Soil Moisture Monitoring for Improved Vineyard Water Resource Management.

Period of Performance

July 1, 2019 – June 30, 2021