Is there a formula, chart, software or something that would show the relationship at any given point between the GeoDrops moisture reading and VWC percentage?
First, I want to say a huge thank you for your patience and for your continued enthusiasm for GeoDrops. It is really rewarding for us to see a user dive this deep into the data and take the initiative you did with that chart.
Please accept my apologies for the delay in getting back to you. I missed this in the Lounge section as we have been fully focused on the current rollout.
While the team is currently prioritized on the launch, I am flagging your initiative here as a great topic for us to look at more closely once we have more capacity for a technical deep dive.
Thank you again for being such a keen part of the community and for sticking with us.
Thanks. I think I need to understand this relationship because of the way GeoDrops views moisture content versus the rest of the world. As my GeoDrop sensor is showing 85% my lawn software is asking for a moisture reading but looking for VWC. Because that is the way the rest of the world calculates soil moisture for suggesting when I water and ET for my lawn. Until the rest of the world catches up with GeoDrops, I think, I need to understand this.
I just hope I am looking at this relationship correctly, so I can setup GeoDrops to monitor soil moisture and alert me at 50% and tell my lawn software that is really a VWC of 15%.
Great technical question. As shown on the roadmap below, a guide for “Raw Moisture vs. Real Moisture” (link) is slated down the road to address how these values correlate.
The team is currently focused on other priorities, so this should provide more context once it is available.
Sorry for the slow reply. So good news. I’m hoping the latest GeoDrops AI Soil Physics Model that we released just a few days ago is actually what you’re looking for.
We’re going to include this in the upcoming User Guide, but for now, I’m going to paste these key take-aways here:
Latest GeoDrops AI Model reports “RAW Moisture (per soil depth)”, “Real Moisture (per soil depth)”, and also a “Dominant Real Moisture (1 single value across all depths)” value.
The “RAW Moisture (per soil depth)” is set such that for a “typical loamy soil”, 50% VWC is approximately 100% RAW Moisture.
Please note that this is a rough (but good enough to be usable) first-order approximation of VWC.
Please also note that “RAW Moisture” here means it’s “Uncalibrated”. That is, we’re completely ignoring the “Set Max Moisture” Field Capacity value, or the max moisture your soil is able to absorb.
Lastly, it’s worth noting that “RAW Moisture” here is not truly RAW Sensor Reading. All the low-level signal-processing (DSP) software modules have been performed to help clean-up, reduce sensor noise, and more. Only the AI Soil Profile and AI Calibration software modules are skipped.
The “Real Moisture (per soil depth)” is what everyone’s accustomed to seeing last year, the final soil moisture calibrated by our advanced AI Soil Physics Model, where MAX moisture (approx 96% ~ 98% moisture percentage) actually equals your soil’s calibrated Field Capacity.
We also added a new “Dominant Real Moisture” value. It is a very easy to use, single soil moisture that is representative of your entire soil depth. So, if your plant root is evenly distributed across most of the sensor probe’s depth (which true for most mature plants, including lawn), then we highly recommend using that value.
Please note that “Dominant Real Moisture” is NOT just “Average of all three Real Moisture depths”.
Its calculation includes an additional level of loose-sensor-contact noise-rejection, as well as proper physics simulation of how, if there’s water at deeper soil depth and very little at shallow soil depth, your plant root knows to absorb most of its water from the deeper soil depth, and so the “dominant real moisture” is closer to how wet your deeper soil depth is at, instead of just the average of all the soil depths.
We’ll try to get the updated User Guide out soon, so all of these will be better documented for the final GeoDrops Software that we wish to deliver to Exit our Soft Launch status.
