Ontology-based simulation of water flow in organic soils applied to Florida sugarcane

Automatic Calibration of a Hydrologic Model for Simulating Groundwater Table Fluctuations on Farms in the Everglades Agricultural Area of South Florida

“…Detailed descriptions of modeling of the hydrologic processes in the EAA can be found in Kwon et al . ().…”

“…In this preliminary analysis the goal was to identify whether the SCE‐UA can retrieve the 'test' values of LK SAT and VK SAT − bedrock which were used to generate simulated farm WTs. Following this preanalysis, our investigation focused on calibrating the two parameters using real field observations because these site‐specific parameters are not often measured but are sensitive among several tested parameters to control farm WT fluctuations in OntoSim‐Sugarcane by controlling the gradients between the farm WT and canal WT (Kwon et al ., ).…”

“…The OntoSim‐Sugarcane (Kwon et al ., ) is a daily time‐step and field‐scale model developed to simulate complex soil–crop–nutrient processes in EAA farm basins of south Florida (Figure ). It has been developed within the OntoSim framework specifically to model farm basins in sugarcane production.…”

“…Recently, algorithms similar to DRAINMOD were utilized in ontology‐based simulation (OntoSim) applied to water management systems in low‐relief agricultural areas with organic soils of south Florida—the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA). This model simulated WT fluctuations in farm basins of the EAA where subirrigation and open ditch drainage are commonly practiced (Kwon et al ., ). Like other complex hydrologic models, it requires a calibration procedure to calculate some measure of 'fit' between observed data and simulated results or outputs—the objective function—until an optimum is attained.…”

“…Like other complex hydrologic models, it requires a calibration procedure to calculate some measure of 'fit' between observed data and simulated results or outputs—the objective function—until an optimum is attained. However, the model calibration was implemented by an iterative process of manually changing parameter values and calculating the objective function (Kwon et al ., ). Although manual calibration succeeds in finding global optima, the surfaces of objective functions can exhibit many local minima, making it difficult to know whether a manually optimized parameter set corresponds to a global or local optimum.…”