CROSMOD project "Crop Stress Monitoring in the semi-arid context of Doukkala, Morocco" supported by ESA and AUC in the framework of EO AFRICA R&D Facility

The CROSMOD project “Crop Stress Monitoring in the semi-arid context of Doukkala, Morocco” supported by ESA and AUC in the framework of EO AFRICA R&D Facility, aimed at developing a procedure for crop yield estimates and extreme events crops shocks monitoring or pest and diseases by integrating multiple satellite data and water-energy-crop modelling, able to support farmers precision agriculture for the case of the Doukkala Irrigation area in Morocco. The project was run by: Chiara Corbari and Nicola Paciolla from Politecnico di Milano (Italy); and Fatima-ezzahra Elghandour and Youssef Houali from Chouaib Doukkali University (Morocco).

The dataset report the results from the three case studies, which are cultivated fields with alfalfa, sugar beet and wheat in Morocco (LE, H, net radiation, land surface temperature, ET, potential irrigation, LAI, soil moisture) generated from FEST-EWB-SAFY model.

The crop-energy-water balance FEST-EWB-SAFY model (Corbari et al., 2022) couples the distributed energy-water balance FEST-EWB (Corbari et al, 2011), which allows computing continuously in time and distributed in space both soil moisture and evapotranspiration fluxes, and the SAFY (Duchemin et al, 2008), simple model for yield prediction and plant development. FEST-EWB is based on the system of energy-water balances equations which are written in terms of a LST that allows closing the energy balance equation, so that this model internal variable can be directly compared with EO LST for model parameters calibration (Corbari & Mancini, 2014). The crop growth simple model (SAFY) (Duchemin et al, 2008) simulate yield and LAI prediction based on light-use efficiency theory with leaf partitioning function.

The code was developed by Chiara Corbari and Nicola Paciolla from Politecnico di Milano (Italy).

[1] Corbari, C., Ravazzani, G. and Mancini, M. (2011), A distributed thermodynamic model for energy and mass balance computation: FEST–EWB. Hydrol. Process., 25: 1443-1452. https://doi.org/10.1002/hyp.7910

[2] Corbari, C., Ben Charfi, I., Al Bitar, A., Skokovic, D., Sobrino, J.A., Perelli, C., Branca, G., Mancini, M. (2022), A fully coupled crop-water-energy balance model based on satellite data for maize and tomato crops yield estimates: The FEST-EWB-SAFY model, Agr. Wat. Man., 272: 107850. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agwat.2022.107850\n

[3] Corbari, C., Mancini, M., 2014. Calibration and validation of a distributed energy water balance model using satellite data of land surface temperature and ground discharge measurements. J. Hydrometeorol. 15, 376–392. https://doi.org/10.1175/JHM-D-12-0173.1

[4] Duchemin, B., Maisongrande, P., Boulet, G., Benhadj, I., 2008. A simple algorithm for yield estimates: Evaluation for semi-arid irrigated winter wheat monitored with green leaf area index. Environ. Modell. Softw. 23(7), 876-892. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2007.10.003