Tillage Scenario Work

[akrherz]

On 28 Aug 2019, I meet with Drs Wang and Cruse to discuss tillage scenario work within DEP. There are lots of moving parts here to keep track of, but here's my attempt to codify what needs to be done.

Domain of interest: select 3 random HUC12s over the 10 Iowa MLRAs.

• (1a) Pick a single climate file and apply it to all runs. We want then to hard code the tillage date to a 5 day increment from Apr 10 thru May 30. The planting date would follow customarily.
• (1b) Use the baseline climate files for each flowpath and do the same varying of tillage dates and thus planting dates.
• (2) Given a near average warmup year, run a baseline to establish a second year soil moisture profile and then inspect the 0-10 cm moisture each day to attempt to start tillage on April 15th. Keep track of when tillage was possible. The thresholds being when the moisture drops below 45,40,35,30,25,20,15 %. If I get to May 30 without planting, just put it in the ground!
• (3) Same as above, but compute the Plastic Limit and use that as the threshold.

Internal Google Doc

[akrherz]

So the implementation for item 2 above is a bit tricky. Firstly, it would be nice to pick two recent years that are not too extreme. It seems like 2017 as the warmup year and 2018 as the real year would be 'good enough'. 2018 got extreme toward the end of the year, but it is hard to not find something extreme over a two year period. So a procedure is to:

• get the water balance files from production run.
• interrogate the timeseries during 2018 and see what we can do about setting a tillage date. This would involve manually editing the generated prj file.

[akrherz]

The runs are done, analysis to go. Will leave this open until analysis code changes made.