Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2007TX270B

Development of an algorithm to create repository of soil moisture and evapotranspiration maps for the state of Texas

Institute: Texas
Year Established: 2007 Start Date: 2007-03-01 End Date: 2008-02-29
Total Federal Funds: $4,890 Total Non-Federal Funds: $10,262

Principal Investigators: Narendra Das, Binayak Mohanty

Project Summary: Soil moisture and evapotranspiration are vital state variables used as initialhoundary conditions which influence many hydrological, weather and climate related processes. In the state of Texas, federal research organizations and water-borne environmental industries use various hydrological models. Providing better quality surface and subsurface soil moisture, and evapotranspiration fluxes as initialhoundary conditions will improve the efficacy and accuracy of the forecast from hydrologic models. Hence, it is proposed to establish a repository of soil moisture/evapotranspiration data for the state of Texas in TWRI. The state and evolution of soil moisture and evapotranspiration are primarily forced by precipitation which is the major source of space and time variability in the hydrologic cycle. For this study Nexrad-based precipitation of resolution 4000 m X 4000 m will be used as the basis for grid-based distributed l-D processbased hydrological modeling. Spatial (resolution: 4000 m X 4000 m) and temporal (resolution: daily) extent of soil moisture and evapotranspiration mean and standard deviation for the state of Texas from the year 2003 and onwards is expected fiom this work.