Priestley-Taylor Jet Propulsion Laboratory Soil Mositure (PT-JPL-SM) Evapotranspiration Model Python Implementation

Gregory H. Halverson (they/them)
gregory.h.halverson@jpl.nasa.gov
Lead developer
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 329G

Adam J. Purdy (he/him)
adpurdy@csumb.edu
Algorithm inventor
California State University Monterey Bay

Joshua B. Fisher (he/him)
jbfisher@chapman.edu
Algorithm inventor
Chapman University

Claire Villanueva-Weeks (she/her)
claire.s.villanueva-weeks@jpl.nasa.gov
Code maintenance
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 329G

Abstract

This software package is a Python implementation of the Priestley-Taylor Jet Propulsion Laboratory Soil Moisture (PT-JP-SM) model of evapotranspiration. It was re-implemented in Python by Gregory Halverson at Jet Propulsion Laboratory based on Python code developed by AJ Purdy. The original PT-JPL model was re-implemented from MATLAB code by Joshua Fisher. The PT-JPL model was designed for processing remote sensing data. It has the ability to partition latent heat flux into canopy transpiration, interception, and soil evaporation. Purdy et al., 2018 incorporated additional constraints from soil water availability on soil evaporation. Additional controls on transpiration are driven by soil water availability and canopy height include a weighting scheme to shift control on transpiration rates from soil water availability to atmospheric demand based on aridity.

The software was developed as part of a research grant by the NASA Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES) program. It was designed for use by the Ecosystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) mission as a precursor for the Surface Biology and Geology (SBG) mission. However, it may also be useful for general remote sensing and GIS projects in Python. This package can be utilized for remote sensing research in Jupyter notebooks and deployed for operations in data processing pipelines.

The software is being released according to the SPD-41 open-science requirements of NASA-funded ROSES projects.

This software accomplishes the following:

This software package is the python implementation of the Priestley-Taylor Jet Propulsion Laboratory Soil Moisture (PT-JPL-SM) model of evapotranspiration.

What are the unique features of the software?

• processing remote sensing data with the PT-JPL-SM model
• ability to partition latent heat flux into canopy transpiration, interception, and soil evaporation
• incorporates explicit constraints to the PT-JPL evapotranspiration model from soil water availability and canopy height

What improvements have been made over existing similar software application?

The Python package was re-implemented in python by Gregory Halverson based on Adam Purdy's PHd project at University of California Irvine.

What problems are you trying to solve in the software?

This software makes the PT-JPL-SM evapotranspiration model accessible for remote sensing researchers.

Does your work relate to current or future NASA (include reimbursable) work that has value to the conduct of aeronautical and space activities? If so, please explain:

This software package was developed as part of a research grant by the NASA Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES) program. This software was designed for use by the Ecosystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) mission as a precursor for the Surface Biology and Geology (SBG) mission, but it may be useful generally for remote sensing and GIS projects in python.

What advantages does this software have over existing software?

This software can be utilized for remote sensing research in Jupyter notebooks and deployed for operations in data processing pipelines.

Are there any known commercial applications? What are they? What else is currently on the market that is similar?

This software is useful for both remote sensing data analysis and building remote sensing data pipelines.

Is anyone interested in the software? Who? Please list organization names and contact information.

• NASA ROSES
• SMAP
• ECOSTRESS
• SBG

What are the current hardware and operating system requirements to run the software? (Platform, RAM requirement, special equipment, etc.)

This software is written entirely in python and intended to be distributed using the pip package manager.

How has the software performed in tests? Describe further testing if planned.

This software has been deployed for ECOSTRESS and ET-Toolbox.

Please identify the customer(s) and sponsors(s) outside of your section that requested and are using your software.

This package is being released according to the SPD-41 open-science requirements of NASA-funded ROSES projects.

macOS

On Apple Silicon, the pykdtree package needs to be compiled from source to avoid conflict with OpenMP.

pip install --no-binary pykdtree pykdtree
pip install .[macos]

Other Platforms

pip install .