Web-based wheat simulation by DSSAT on sensor observation service standard API

Abstract

We developed a web-based crop simulation system for wheat on top of Sensor Observation Service (SOS) standard API that demonstrates a good interoperability between weather data source and crop simulation program. DSSAT is used as a simulation engine that calculates expected yield for different weather, climate and agronomic scenarios. The system is called as Tomorrow's Wheat (TMW). Daily agro-weather data generated by NIAES [6] from AMeDAS data [7] in Japan are collected and stored in a cloud sensor infrastructure named cloudSense. The cloudSense provides historical weather data, which are minimum temperature, maximum temperature, precipitation and solar radiation, via Sensor Observation Service (SOS) interface defined as OGC's standard API. The historical weather data is seamlessly connected to a weather generator for generating 100 weather scenarios via SOS interface in order to reflect the uncertainty in weather scenario into expected yield. Users can set other factor of scenarios by giving a planting date, a variety of wheat and soil characteristics from an interactive web user interface. The result of the crop simulation is expected wheat yield distributions shown as box-plots for five different planting dates. It supports decision making of farmers to set the best planting time window to optimize yield, its stability and minimize the risk. Tomorrow's Wheat presents the advantage of standard API for securing interoperability in connecting weather data to crop simulation. The simulation system can be connected to any weather data source that has SOS API. Each process in this system will be further transformed as a layered-web service so that other developer will be able to utilize or replace functionalities easily.