As global agricultural needs continue to rise, the need to be able to measure how much water permeates soil also increases.
It is estimated that one out of three counties in the United States experience severe drought or worse, with irrigated farms losing approximately $30 billion a year due to drought.
Despite the pressing need for more efficient irrigation water management to battle agricultural drought, only 12% of irrigated farms in the U.S. have installed soil moisture sensors, which measure soil moisture one meter into the ground. These sensors are challenging to deploy due to a lack of understanding of the spatiotemporal patterns of soil sensor measurements at this depth due to soil composition and variations in topography in a field of crops.
Researchers in the School of Chemical Engineering in the College of Engineering, Architecture and Technologyat Oklahoma State University have developed an innovative computational method to greatly improve the speed, accuracy and reliability of soil moisture modeling.
Dr. Zheyu Jiang, assistant professor in CHE, along with Zeyuan Song, a graduate research assistant on his team, started looking at this problem in 2022 and recently published a paperin Computers and Geotechnics on their newly developed mathematical method for quantifying moisture levels inside the soil.
Source : okstate.edu