A Land Surface Modeling System for Use in Agricultural Decision Support

Agricultural decisions are increasingly becoming augmented by decision support systems that incorporate soil and weather forecast-driven agriculture-specific models. NCAR has developed such a system. It combines weather forecast data from the NCAR DICast™ system with the Land-Surface Modeling system called the High-Resolution Land Data Assimilation System (HRLDAS) to produce high resolution soil temperature and moisture forecasts. These forecasts can be incorporated directly within a decision support system or used as input to pest or other agricultural models. Efforts are ongoing to develop effective graphics and/or tables to communicate the import of the model output. This is critical to acceptance in the user community.