A dynamic root simulation model in response to soil moisture heterogeneity

2015 ◽  
Vol 113 ◽  
pp. 40-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Songyang Li ◽  
Jixun Gao ◽  
Qingsheng Zhu ◽  
Lingqiu Zeng ◽  
Ji Liu
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Bouda ◽  
Jan Vanderborght ◽  
Mathieu Javaux

<p>Recent advances in scaling up water flows on root system networks hold promise for improving predictions of water uptake at large scales. These developments are particularly timely, as persistent difficulties in getting Earth system models to accurately represent soil-root water flows, especially under drying or heterogeneous soil moisture conditions, are now a major obstacle describing the water limitation of terrestrial fluxes.</p><p>One recently developed upscaling formalism has been shown to be both free of discretisation error in flow predictions regardless of scale and with computational cost linearly diminishing with the number of soil subdomains considered. What has been missing from this approach, however, is a proven method to apply it generally – i.e. to an arbitrary root system architecture discretised on an arbitrary grid.</p><p>The work presented here demonstrates a general algorithm that can be applied to a wide range of root system architectures (the only assumption being that only one lateral root originates at one point along a parent root) discretised on a grid consisting of a series of soil layers of variable thickness, as is common in Earth system models. It is further shown theoretically that both of these restrictions can in principle be relaxed and that this approach can in principle be extended to conditions of soil moisture heterogeneity – i.e. situations where each root segment in a soil grid cell faces a different water potential at the soil-root interface.</p><p>This work represents both a practical advance bringing broad applicability to this upscaling approach and a major theoretical advance as exact solutions for water uptake under conditions of soil moisture heterogeneity within grid cells were previously unknown. While obtaining exact solutions despite heterogeneity within the grid cell requires a way of finding the overall mean soil water potential faced by the plant, this advance nevertheless points to possible directions of future research for overcoming the major hurdle of soil moisture heterogeneity.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (6) ◽  
pp. 762-773 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaime Puértolas ◽  
Marta Pardos ◽  
Carlos de Ollas ◽  
Alfonso Albacete ◽  
Ian C Dodd

Abstract Soil moisture heterogeneity in the root zone is common both during the establishment of tree seedlings and in experiments aiming to impose semi-constant soil moisture deficits, but its effects on regulating plant water use compared with homogenous soil drying are not well known in trees. Pronounced vertical soil moisture heterogeneity was imposed on black poplar (Populus nigra L.) grown in soil columns by altering irrigation frequency, to test whether plant water use, hydraulic responses, root phytohormone concentrations and root xylem sap chemical composition differed between wet (well-watered, WW), and homogeneously (infrequent deficit irrigation, IDI) and heterogeneously dry soil (frequent deficit irrigation, FDI). At the same bulk soil water content, FDI plants had greater water use than IDI plants, probably because root abscisic acid (ABA) concentration was low in the upper wetter layer of FDI plants, which maintained root xylem sap ABA concentration at basal levels in contrast with IDI. Soil drying did not increase root xylem concentration of any other hormone. Nevertheless, plant-to-plant variation in xylem jasmonic acid (JA) concentration was negatively related to leaf stomatal conductance within WW and FDI plants. However, feeding detached leaves with high (1200 nM) JA concentrations via the transpiration stream decreased transpiration only marginally. Xylem pH and sulphate concentration decreased in FDI plants compared with well-watered plants. Frequent deficit irrigation increased root accumulation of the cytokinin trans-zeatin (tZ), especially in the dry lower layer, and of the ethylene precursor 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylic acid (ACC), in the wet upper soil layer. Root hormone accumulation might explain the maintenance of high root hydraulic conductance and water use in FDI plants (similar to well-watered plants) compared with IDI plants. In irrigated tree crops, growers could vary irrigation scheduling to control water use by altering the hormone balance.


2000 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 169-174
Author(s):  
Nozomu HIROSE ◽  
Toshio KOIKE ◽  
Hiroshi ISHIDAIRA

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haojin Zhao ◽  
Roland Baatz ◽  
Carsten Montzka ◽  
Harry Vereecken ◽  
Harrie-Jan Hendricks Franssen

<p>Soil moisture plays an important role in the coupled water and energy cycles of the terrestrial system. However, the characterization of soil moisture at the large spatial scale is far from trivial. To cope with this challenge, the combination of data from different sources (in situ measurements by cosmic ray neutron sensors, remotely sensed soil moisture and simulated soil moisture by models) is pursued. This is done by multiscale data assimilation, to take the different resolutions of the data into account. A large number of studies on the assimilation of remotely sensed soil moisture in land surface models has been published, which show in general only a limited improvement in the characterization of root zone soil moisture, and no improvement in the characterization of evapotranspiration. In this study it was investigated whether an improved modelling of soil moisture content, using a simulation model where the interactions between the land surface, surface water and groundwater are better represented, can contribute to extracting more information from SMAP data. In this study over North-Rhine-Westphalia, the assimilation of remotely sensed soil moisture from SMAP in the coupled land surface-subsurface model TSMP was tested. Results were compared with the assimilation in the stand-alone land surface model CLM. It was also tested whether soil hydraulic parameter estimation in combination with state updating could give additional skill compared to assimilation in CLM stand-alone and without parameter updating. Results showed that modelled soil moisture by TSMP did not show a systematic bias compared to SMAP, whereas CLM was systematically wetter than TSMP. Therefore, no prior bias correction was needed in the data assimilation. The results illustrate how the difference in simulation model and parameter estimation result in significantly different estimated soil moisture contents and evapotranspiration.  </p>


2013 ◽  
Vol 49 (10) ◽  
pp. 6450-6458 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trenton E. Franz ◽  
M. Zreda ◽  
T. P. A. Ferre ◽  
R. Rosolem

Author(s):  
E. J. BARTON ◽  
C. M. TAYLOR ◽  
C. KLEIN ◽  
P. P. HARRIS ◽  
X. MENG

AbstractConvection over the Tibetan Plateau (TP) has been linked to heavy rain and flooding in downstream parts of China. Understanding processes which influence the development of convection on the TP could contribute to better forecasting of these extreme events. TP scale (~1000 km) soil moisture gradients have been shown to influence formation of convective systems over the eastern TP. The importance of smaller scale (~10 km) variability has been identified in other regions (including the Sahel and Mongolia) but has yet to be investigated for the TP. In addition, compared to studies over flat terrain, much less is known about soil moisture-convection feedbacks above complex topography. In this study we use satellite observations of cold cloud, land surface temperature and soil moisture to analyze the effect of mesoscale soil moisture heterogeneity on the initiation of strong convection in the complex TP environment. We find that strong convection is favored over negative (positive) land surface temperature (soil moisture) gradients. The signal is strongest for less vegetation and low topographic complexity, though still significant up to a local standard deviation of 300 m in elevation, accounting for 65% of cases. In addition, the signal is dependent on background wind. Strong convective initiation is only sensitive to local (10s of km) soil moisture heterogeneity for light wind speeds, though large scale (100s of km) gradients may still be important for strong wind speeds. Our results demonstrate that, even in the presence of complex topography, local soil moisture variability plays an important role in storm development.


1990 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael E. Wetzstein ◽  
Wesley N. Musser ◽  
Ronald W. McClendon ◽  
David M. Edwards

Abstract The importance of timeliness is investigated in the selection of machinery complements for double-crop wheat and soybean production in the southeastern coastal plain. An intertemporal stochastic simulation model was developed to generate probability distributions that were evaluated with stochastic dominance analysis. This research investigated the importance of intertemporal production linkages and inadequate soil moisture on machinery selection. Failure to include these dimensions can result in erroneous machinery choices.


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