IMPROVING WORLD AGRICULTURAL SUPPLY AND DEMAND ESTIMATES BY INTEGRATING NASA REMOTE SENSING SOIL MOISTURE DATA INTO USDA WORLD AGRICULTURAL OUTLOOK BOARD DECISION MAKING ENVIRONMENT

摘要

A primary goal of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is to exapnd markets for U.S. agricultural products and support global economic development. The USDA World Agricultural Outlook Board (WAOB) supports this goal by developing monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) for the U.S. and major foreign producing countries. Because weather has a significant impact on crop progress, conditions, and production, WAOB prepares frequent agricultural weather assessments, in the GIS-based, Global Agricultural Decision Support Environment (GLADSE). The main objective of this project, thus, is to improve WAOB estimates by integrating NASA remote sensing soil moisture observations and research results into GLADSE. Soil moisture, a primary data gap at WAOB, will be generated by the Land Parameter Retrieval Model (LPRM, developed by NASA GSFC and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and customized to WAOB requirements. LPRM soil moisture will be directly integrated into GLADSE, as well as indirectly by first being assimilated into USDA agricultural Research Service (ARS) Environmental Policy Integrated Climate (EPIC) crop model. The LPRM-enhanced EPIC will be validated using three major agricultural regions important to WAOB and then integrated into GLADSE. Project benchmarking will be based on retrospective analyses of WAOB analog year comparisons. The latter are between a given year and historical years with similar weather patterns. WAOB is the focal point for economic intelligence within the USDA. Thus, improving WAOB agricultural estimates by integrating satellite observations and model outputs will visibly demonstrate the value of NASA resources and maximize the societal benefits of NASA investments.