New Mexico Geological Society Annual Spring Meeting — Abstracts

Total available water (TAW) is one of the most difficult to ascertain parameters necessary for predicting water storage in the root zone. As such, a method for parametrizing TAW is necessary given the paucity of in-situ measurements that are available. TAW is determined in a novel way as a model fitting parameter. A soil water balance model, the Evaporation, Transpiration and Recharge Model, is used to simulate root zone soil moisture for an area of interest. The TAW parameter of the model is varied until agreement is found between the model simulated and remotely-sensed root zone soil moisture observations on a pixel by pixel basis. In this study, we present initial modeling efforts and a remotely sensed validation data set that will be used to optimize TAW for the area of interest: the Jornada Long Term Ecological Research station (Jornada LTER) in south central New Mexico. Within the Jornada LTER, the model predictions and remote sensing datasets of root zone soil moisture are compared to neutron probe data from an approximately 2.7 kilometer-long transect of 89 neutron soil moisture probes within the Jornada LTER.