Russell Ranch Deployment

We had a great visit to UC Davis’s Russell Ranch, home of the LTRAS experiment.  The PI’s were Lyndon Estes (Princeton) and Darren Drewry (JPL), with the goal of realtime monitoring of crop growth and microclimate in control, water limited, and N-limited corn fields. Since crop growth forecasts are largely driven by remote sensing, these observations help to improve space-borne satellite retrievals for modeling, but also provide important constraints to the local microclimate, including temperature and soil moisture, which are critical to improving the predictions of climate change impacts on crop productivity.

The sensor is put 10′ aloft.

Inserting the pole into the ground.

The pole aloft

Light levels below the canopy are used to estimate the absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (APAR).