The "Corn Belt" is a commonly used term, but often referenced as a vaguely defined region in the Midwest USA. A few key studies have delineated synoptic maps of the Corn Belt boundaries going back to the early 20th century, but a modern flexible and accessible framework for mapping the Corn Belt in space and time is needed. New tools provide reference maps for the Corn Belt in the 21st century and the ability to quantify space-time changes in corn cropping patterns. The Landuse and Agricultural Management Practices web-Service (LAMPS) was used to estimate the average corn (maize, Zea mays L.) area in each county of the contiguous 48 USA states for the years 2010-2016. LAMPS provides a modified areal Fraction of corn (F) used to map the Corn Belt at three intensity levels, for example. The resulting patterns illustrate a mostly contiguous Midwest Corn Belt surrounded by more scattered regions, including southern and eastern regions. We also mapped irrigated areas and temporal changes in F. Mapped patterns have the potential to help researchers study issues related to food, feed, biofuel, and water security.
Abstract. This paper presents two new modeling components based on the object modeling system v3 (OMS3) for the calculation of the shortwave incident radiation (R sw ↓) on complex topography settings, and the implementation of several ancillary tools. The first component, NewAGE-SwRB, accounts for elevation slope, aspect, shadow of the sites, and uses suitable parameterization for obtaining the cloudless irradiance. A second component, NewAGE-DEC-MOD's is implemented to estimate the irradiance reduction due to the presence of clouds according to three parameterizations. To obtain a working modeling composition that is comparable with ground data at measurement stations the two components are connected to a kriging component. With the help of an additional component, NewAGE-V (verification package), the performance of modeled (R sw ↓) is quantitatively evaluated. The two components (and the various parameterizations they contain) are tested using the data from three basins, and some simple verification tests were carried out to assess the goodness of the methods used. Moreover, a raster mode test is performed in order to show the capability of the system in providing solar radiation raster maps. The components are part of a larger system, JGrass-NewAGE, their input and outputs are geometrical objects immediately displayed in a geographical information system (GIS). They can be used seamlessly with the various modeling solutions available in JGrass-NewAGE for the estimation of long wave radiation, evapotranspiration, and snow melting, as well as standalone components to just estimate shortwave radiation for various uses. The modularity of the approach leads to more accurate physical-statistical studies aimed to assess in depth the components' performances and extends their results spatially, without the necessity of recoding any part of the component.
Environmental modeling frameworks support scientific model development by providing an Application Programming Interface (API) which model developers use to implement models. This paper presents results of an investigation on the framework invasiveness of environmental modeling frameworks. Invasiveness is defined as the quantity of dependencies between model code and the modeling framework. This research investigates relationships between invasiveness and the quality of modeling code. Additionally, we investigate the relationship between invasiveness and two common framework designs (lightweight vs. heavyweight). Five metrics to measure framework invasiveness were proposed and applied to measure invasiveness between model and framework code of several implementations of Thornthwaite and the Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System (PRMS), two hydrological models. Framework invasiveness measurements were compared with existing software metrics including size (lines of code), cyclomatic complexity, and object-oriented coupling with generally positive correlations being found. We found that models with lower framework invasiveness tended to be smaller, less complex, and have lower coupling. In addition, the lightweight framework implementations of the Thornthwaite and PRMS models were less invasive than the heavyweight framework model implementations. Our initial results suggest that framework invasiveness is undesirable for model code quality and that lightweight frameworks may help reduce invasiveness.
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