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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Beltsville, Maryland (BARC) » Beltsville Agricultural Research Center » Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #392490
Research Project: Integrating Remote Sensing, Measurements and Modeling for Multi-Scale Assessment of Water Availability, Use, and Quality in Agroecosystems

Location: Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory

Title: Crop-CASMA: A web geoprocessing and map service based architecture and implementation for serving soil moisture and crop vegetation condition data over United States cropland

Author
item ZHANG, C. - George Mason University
item YANG, Z. - National Agricultural Statistical Service (NASS, USDA)
item ZHAO, H. - George Mason University
item SUN, Z. - George Mason University
item DI, L. - George Mason University
item BINDLISH, R. - Goddard Space Flight Center
item LIU, P. - Goddard Space Flight Center
item COLLIANDER, A - Jet Propulsion Laboratory
item MUELLER, R. - National Agricultural Statistical Service (NASS, USDA)
item Crow, Wade
item REICHLE, R. - Goddard Space Flight Center
item BOLTEN, J. - Goddard Space Flight Center
item YUEH, S. - Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Submitted to: International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 6/29/2022
Publication Date: 7/12/2022
Citation: Zhang, C., Yang, Z., Zhao, H., Sun, Z., Di, L., Bindlish, R., Liu, P.W., Colliander, A., Mueller, R., Crow, W.T., Reichle, R., Bolten, J., Yueh, S. 2022. Crop-CASMA: A web geoprocessing and map service based architecture and implementation for serving soil moisture and crop vegetation condition data over United States cropland. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation. 112. Article 102902. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jag.2022.102902.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jag.2022.102902

Interpretive Summary: Land data assimilation systems combine soil moisture information provided by a land surface model with independent remote sensing observations to produce optimized estimates of root-zone soil water availability in croplands. Such systems are now run operationally and provide near-real-time monitoring of agricultural drought severity. Such monitoring can, in turn, be used to improve crop-condition assessments and yield forecasts provided by operational USDA agencies. Reflecting this potential, the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) has recently begun to operationally ingest and publicly serve root-zone soil moisture data acquired from the NASA Soil Moisture Active/Passive (SMAP) satellite mission. This paper describes the web geoprocessing and mapping server designed by NASS for this purpose. As such, it represents an important milestone in USDA’s on-going effort to provide improved drought-relevant information to its stakeholders.

Technical Abstract: Soil moisture is an essential parameter to understand crop conditions throughout the growing season. Collecting soil moisture data by field observation is labor-intensive, especially when attempting to obtain Conterminous United States (CONUS) geographic coverage. In addition, using soil moisture for assessing current and future crop conditions is best realized by combining soil moisture estimates with concurrent observations of crop conditions. However, until recently this capability has not been available to the public. In this paper, we present an interoperable data service application system, the Crop Condition and Soil Moisture Analytics (Crop-CASMA), that facilitates the retrieval, analysis, visualization, and sharing of soil moisture data for the CONUS. This system delivers a variety of satellite remote sensing based data products that are derived from Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) Level-4 data and SMAP Thermal Hydraulic disaggregation of Soil Moisture (THySM) data, as well as vegetation index data derived from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) observations. To make services interoperable and reusable, all data products are disseminated via Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Coverage Service (WCS) interface standards. Additionally, a suite of geoprocessing operations, such as geospatial statistics, time-series profile generation, PDF map production, and image composition, has been implemented in the OGC Web Processing Service (WPS) interface standard. The implementation shows the proposed web service system can significantly simplify the mapping and quantitative analysis of soil moisture and crop condition over US cropland. In addition, it is interoperable with GIS software and has been successfully integrated with the web-based applications.