Temporal stability in soil water content patterns across agricultural fields

When a field or a small watershed is repeatedly surveyed for soil water content, locations can often be identified where soil water contents are either consistently larger or consistently less than the study area average. This phenomenon has been called temporal stability, time stability, temporal persistence, or rank stability in spatial patterns of soil water contents. Temporal stability is of considerable interest in terms of facilitating upscaling of observed soil water contents to obtain average values across the observation area, improving soil water monitoring strategies, and correcting the monitoring results for missing data. The objective of this work was to contribute to the existing knowledge base on temporal stability in soil water patterns using frequent multi-depth measurements with Multisensor Capacitance Probes (MCPs) installed in a coarse-texture soil under multi-year corn production. Water contents at 10, 30, 50, and 80 cm depths were measured every 10 min for 20 months of continuous observation from May 2001 to December 2002. The MCPs revealed temporal stability in soil water content patterns. Temporal stability was found to increase with depth. The statistical hypothesis could not be rejected (P < 0.0001) that data collected each 10 min, each 2 h, each day, and each week had the same temporal stability. The locations that were best for estimating the average water contents were different for different depths. The best three locations for the whole observation period were the same as the best locations for a month of observations in about 60% of the cases. Temporal stability for a specific location and depth could serve as a good predictor of the utility of this location for estimating the area-average soil water content for that depth. Temporal stability could be efficiently used to correct area-average water contents for missing data. Soil water contents can be upscaled and efficiently monitored using the temporal stability of soil water content patterns.