Towards operational forecasting of agricultural soil water in Australia

Abstract

Australia has large and diverse agricultural industries, in addition to a highly variable climate. Recent government policy has focussed on increasing farm productivity. One of the challenges for achieving this, especially for rain-fed agriculture, is improving local-scale information on current and forecast future soil water status. Reliable soil water forecasts will allow users to better predict likely future water availability and make better informed farming decisions over timescales from days to seasons. This paper explores the state-of-the-art of the components that need to be brought together to transition our research knowledge into operational soil water forecasts, and the challenge..