Soil Moisture
Introduction¶
As it rains, the soil becomes increasingly saturated, resulting in increased runoff. NovaStar5 tracks the soil conditions on a continuous basis. Clicking Operator's Soil Moisture checkbox displays an overlay on the map indicating these saturation levels, allowing improved situational awareness of ares with increased runoff potential. In the following image, two basins' soil moisture levels are displayed: the basin to the west has a level of 40-60% saturation and the basin to the east reflects 0-20% saturation.
Data Source¶
Soil moisture, created using the Sacramento Soil Moisture Model and made available from the National Weather Service, is retrieved daily and stored in the NovaStar database. The interactive website for this data can be found at https://www.cnrfc.noaa.gov.
Soil moisture content is expressed in two types of data: upper and lower zones. The upper zone is the top section of the ground. When it rains, the water will hit the upper zone and it can either turn into surface runoff, interflow, or percolate to the lower zone. The lower zone is baseflow. The upper zone is of particular interest because if it saturates faster than it can percolate, all the precip will turn into runoff.
During precipitation events, immediate changes in the upper zone storage may be expected, but the model is more complex than that. In order to avoid overreacting to early season rainfall, the upper zone (UZFW, blue chart below) doesn't receive any water until the upper zone tension water (UZTW, purple chart below). Operator is displaying the upper zone (UZFW) values.
(Calculations¶
A maximum saturation level is determined for each basin by NOAA. The percent of saturation is calculated dividing the current saturation level by the maximum.
Strategy¶
Once NovaStar has consumed the data and the saturation percentage has been calculated, Operator retrieves this data through Data Web Services.
Configuration And Technical Details¶
The Soil Moisture layer uses the data-layer-geojson-polygon-point class.