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Representative locations from time series of soil water content using time stability and wavelet analysis

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Abstract

The concept of time stability has been widely used in the design and assessment of monitoring networks of soil moisture, as well as in hydrological studies, because it is as a technique that allows identifying of particular locations having the property of representing mean values of soil moisture in the field. In this work, we assess the effect of time stability calculations as new information is added and how time stability calculations are affected at shorter periods, subsampled from the original time series, containing different amounts of precipitation. In doing so, we defined two experiments to explore the time stability behavior. The first experiment sequentially adds new data to the previous time series to investigate the long-term influence of new data in the results. The second experiment applies a windowing approach, taking sequential subsamples from the entire time series to investigate the influence of short-term changes associated with the precipitation in each window. Our results from an operating network (seven monitoring points equipped with four sensors each in a 2-ha blueberry field) show that as information is added to the time series, there are changes in the location of the most stable point (MSP), and that taking the moving 21-day windows, it is clear that most of the variability of soil water content changes is associated with both the amount and intensity of rainfall. The changes of the MSP over each window depend on the amount of water entering the soil and the previous state of the soil water content. For our case study, the upper strata are proxies for hourly to daily changes in soil water content, while the deeper strata are proxies for medium-range stored water. Thus, different locations and depths are representative of processes at different time scales. This situation must be taken into account when water management depends on soil water content values from fixed locations.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by CONICYT Chile through FONDECYT Grant 11090032 and CONICYT/FONDAP-15130015. We are grateful to Dr. Shäfli for providing the MATLAB® codes needed to perform the wavelet analysis and Torrence and Compto. Codes and data sets are available upon request. This article benefited from useful comment from Roto Quezada, José Luis Arumí, and Braulio Lahuathe.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Water Resources, Laboratory of Comparative Policies in Water Resources CONICYT/FONDAP-15130015, University of Concepción, Chillán, Chile

    Diego Rivera

  2. Department of Mechanization and Energy, University of Concepción, Chillán, Chile

    Mario Lillo

  3. Departamento de Ciencias de la Vida, Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas–ESPE, Sangolquí, Ecuador

    Stalin Granda

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  1. Diego Rivera
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  3. Stalin Granda
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Correspondence to Diego Rivera.

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Rivera, D., Lillo, M. & Granda, S. Representative locations from time series of soil water content using time stability and wavelet analysis. Environ Monit Assess 186, 9075–9087 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-014-4067-0

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