Location: Soil and Water Management Research
Project Number: 3090-13000-015-013-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Sep 25, 2018
End Date: Sep 24, 2020
Objective:
ARS Bushland weighing lysimeter quality control and assurance (QA/QC) procedures will be converted from Excel spreadsheet format to a MATLAB program that will be compiled, resulting in a much faster QA/QC process.
Approach:
In cooperation with and guided by Bushland ARS scientists, a program will be written in MATLAB to replicate the functionality of Excel spreadsheets currently used by ARS for quality assurance and control procedures. When finished, the MATLAB program will be compiled to an executable file that can be installed and run in a Windows 10 environment, resulting in a much faster QA/QC process. A skilled MATLAB programmer will be engaged by cooperator for this effort. All functionality of the ARS Excel spreadsheets will be replicated, including graphical user interface, comparative raw and adjusted data plotting on daily and yearly longitudinal scales, scatterplotting for examination of correlations and outliers. Significant improvements will be added, including ability to plot temperature, wind speed, relative humidity, solar irradiance and dew point along with lysimeter water storage for identification of environmental effects on apparent storage (lysimeter mass) due to, for example, dew fall and frost, wind gusts, clouds and temperature changes. Both program code and an executable program will be supplied to ARS.
