Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID MT_2024_Felton

From Probes to Pixels: scaling-up soil water content monitoring across Montana

Institute: Montana
Year Established: 2024 Start Date: 2024-09-01 End Date: 2025-08-31
Total Federal Funds: $25,000 Total Non-Federal Funds: $25,088

Principal Investigators: Andrew Felton

Project Summary: The goal of this proposal is to scale-up real-time soil water content monitoring and forecasting across Montana. The Montana Mesonet is one of the largest state-level networks of soil water content monitoring in the United States, providing accurate, near-real-time root-zone soil water content measurements across Montana’s diverse ecosystems and climates. However, tools to extrapolate these small-scale point measurements across large spatial extents are still missing. We propose to use this Seed Grant to build an initial data acquisition and assembly pipeline, and modeling framework to predict, map and forecast root-zone soil water content (e.g., for two weeks) across Montana at intermediate (e.g., 30 m) spatial resolution.