PulseLab in California and New Mexico

Group members went out to California in June to install sensors in agricultural fields with the goal of realtime monitoring of crop growth and microclimate in control, water limited, and N-limited corn fields. As part of the PulseLab project, Adam Wolf, Lyndon Estes, Ben Siegfried and Matteo Kruijssen (PEI Grand Challenge intern working with Lyndon and Darren Drewry from NASA JPL for the summer, as part of a SURP grant) went out in California in June to install sensors in agricultural fields 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.

At the end of July, Adam and Ben went out again, to New Mexico this time. You can see the pictures of the pods installation HERE.