Soil Moisture Relationship with GeoDrops

[homedigy-lawrence]

Hi @ebelew -

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

Please let me know if you ahve any questions!

Thanks,
Lawrence