Estimating soil available water capacity within a Mediterranean vineyard watershed using satellite imagery and crop model inversion

Abstract

Soil available water capacity (SAWC) is a key factor to be considered when assessing soil capability to provide ecosystem services. The current study deepens the use of remotely sensed data for mapping SAWC and its components from crop model inversion. The inversion was conducted using the STICS (Simulateur mulTIdiscplinaire pour les Cultures Standard) crop model along with the GLUE (Generalized Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation) algorithm on a panel of 14 sites within a rainfed vineyard catchment located in Southern France. Several constraint variables derived from Landsat7 ETM + satellite imagery (leaf area index - LAI - and evapotranspiration - ET) or in-situ measurements (surface soil moisture - SSM), were used in the inversion process alone or in combination.Three main outcomes could be reported when comparing retrievals of both SAWC and its components against field estimates. First, retrievals were significantly correlated with ground estimates for some SAWC components and some scenarios of constraint variables, although overall retrieving performances were quite poor. Second, poor retrieving performances for two scenarios of constraint variables were related to few sites for which specific processes were disregarded by the modelling framework, namely allochthonous water supply and waterlogging during wet autumn and summer. Third, we could identify some promising combinations of constraint variables, after the removal of the aforementioned sites with specific processes. These promising combinations were (LAI, ET) and even more (LAI, ET, SSM) for estimating SAWC and root zone thickness, as well as SSM for estimating soil moistures at field capacity and wilting point of the topsoil layer. Provided we can avoid site-specific processes, our approach may further provide spatial sampling of SAWC and related components, to be used as surrogate input data for DSM models.