Reports

Manual vs Turbulent Vegetation Height

A comparison of vegetation height measured by tape measure in the field versus vegetation height computed from turbulence data. 

The vegetation height measured by tape measure in the field is relatively straight forward.  It is usually an average of about 20 individual measurements.  Sometimes, especially when the vegetation is very short this is an eyeball estimate by field personnel.

The turbulence vegetation height is calculated from the eddy data and is usually very noisy.  The noise is cleaned up by filtering by u-star (veg height is good when u-star > 0.3) and a max veg height limit.  Then a five day running mean is used to smooth it out.

Bouldin Alfalfa 2017-01-01 to 2019-12-31

Figure 1. Time series of the turbulent veg height (line) and manual field measurements (dots)

Figure 2. Turbulent veg height versus manual field measurements.

Bouldin Corn 2017-04-25 to 2019-12-31

Figure 3. Time series of the turbulent veg height (line) and manual field measurements (dots)

Figure 4. Turbulent veg height versus manual field measurements.