Analysis and quality control of weighing lysimeter water storage data

Steven R. Evett, Paul D. Colaizzi, Gary W. Marek, Karen S. Copeland and Brice B. Ruthardt

Agricultural Water Management, 2025, vol. 317, issue C

Abstract: A tool was developed to analyze 5-minute weighing lysimeter apparent relative water storage data and reduce it to values of the water balance components, including evapotranspiration (ET), dew and frost accumulation, precipitation, irrigation, and drainage while applying quality control measures. Algorithms automatically identify precipitation, and dew and frost accumulations in the 5-minute data, and place flags appropriately (“P” or “DW”) in a column that is referenced by formulae that separately calculate values for these. Noise can, however, cause false identification of precipitation or frost and dew accumulations, so another column is made available in which the user can enter flags to either nullify (“NO”) false automatic identification, or conversely, identify precipitation or dew and frost accumulations (“P” or “DW”) not automatically identified. This column also serves for entry of specific flags identifying, amongst others, apparent relative water storage changes due to irrigation, drainage tank emptying, and counterweight adjustments. Other algorithms act upon these flags to correct and adjust the original raw relative storage values so that the adjusted relative storage reflects only ET. Two different methods of ET calculation provide for error checking and data validation. The spreadsheet was applied to 30 + years of 5-minute lysimeter data. Example data from 2018 illustrate the processing and quality control procedures.

Keywords: Evapotranspiration; Water balance; Dew; Frost; Irrigation; Precipitation; Accuracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378377425003889
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:317:y:2025:i:c:s0378377425003889

DOI: 10.1016/j.agwat.2025.109674

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural Water Management is currently edited by B.E. Clothier, W. Dierickx, J. Oster and D. Wichelns

More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().