Modeling water flow dynamics in an agricultural field in Cyprus using image spectral data

Soil degradation implies a long-term decline in soil productivity and quality. Therefore, soil health restoration constitutes an urgent priority to achieve sustainable ecosystem services that are vital to life on Earth. That requires the development of targeted agricultural policy maps. To generate them on a national scale, a large number of hydrogeological models should be built for selected representative agricultural fields. However, the parameterization of the effective properties as input in hydrogeological models for simulating water flow and solute transport is a time-consuming and costly process characterized by high uncertainty because of the spatial variability of soil physical and hydraulic properties. In the long-term, the usage of Earth Observation (EO) data in parameterizing effective soil properties, meteorological conditions, and vegetation indexes have a clear advantage over other methods based on ground-only measured data since using EO data allows repeated monitoring of land degradation dynamics over larger spatial scales and multiple climatic/biogeographical regions at lower costs and less time-consuming. In this study, integrating EO models and global pedotransfer functions, a concept is proposed for covering the absence of data and estimating the effective parameters as input in a single porosity model for simulating the water flow dynamics in a selected agricultural field in Cyprus. For the calibration and validation of the models, groundwater level data from two different periods were utilized. The performance statistics of the developed water flow model for the entire simulation were characterized fairly well, setting the suggested concept as a valuable tool for parameterizing the effective hydraulic parameters.Acknowledgement“The authors acknowledge the ‘EXCELSIOR’: ERATOSTHENES: EΧcellence Research Centre for Earth Surveillance and Space-Based Monitoring of the Environment H2020 Widespread Teaming project (www.excelsior2020.eu). The ‘EXCELSIOR’ project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 857510, from the Government of the Republic of Cyprus through the Directorate General for the European Programmes, Coordination and Development and the Cyprus University of Technology.”