Soil Plant Atmosphere Continuum Estimator in GEOframe (GEOSPACE): A coupled model for the Environmental Modeling

Thanks to the advancement of technologies of the last century, today it is possible to talk about Digital Twin models (DT). They want to accurately reproduce through high-fidelity computer models the state of evolution of a generic physical entity. The aim of DT is understanding, simulating systems behaviors, and evaluating them under changing boundary and initial conditions. This contribution illustrates the digital twin model of GEOframe Soil Plant Atmosphere Continuum Estimator (GEOSPACE). It is the ecohydrological model of the GEOframe system and it aims to simulate the soil-plant-atmosphere interactions to study and analyze the complex processes that occur in the Earth Critical Zone (CZ). GEOSPACE is developed in Java using the Object-Oriented programming paradigm and it is completely open source, available on the GEOframe GitHub website. The code organization and its functionalities besides solving the hydrological issues are designed according to principle of open science to be inspectable and verified by third parties. As all the GEOframe models, it is organized in models components that are connected together before the execution time with an appropriate scripting based on Object Modelling System v3 (OMS3) framework. GEOSPACE is a coupled model in which the three major components are WHETGEO, GEO-ET and BrokerGEO. WHETGEO, Water Heat and Transport in GEOframe, solves the conservative form of Richardson-Richards equation using the Newton-Casulli-Zanolli algorithm. WHETGEO also implements the numerical solution shown in Casulli and Zanolli (2005) to solve the advection-dispersion equation and describe the solute transport. GEO-ET, EvapoTranspiration in GEOframe, computes evapotranspiration according to three different formulations, the Priestley-Taylor model, Penman FAO model and GEOframe- Prospero model. GEO-ET considers Jarvis model and Ball-Berry-Leuning model to compute environmental and water stress factors. BrokerGEO is the coupler component that allows the exchange of data between the other two components in memory and considers the root water uptake for the computation of the actual evapotranspiration. The GEOSPACE model was tested with the lysimeter of the “Spike II” experiment International Congress on Environmental Modelling & Software iEMSs of the Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne. The analysis we carried out with GEOSPACE are about the flux partitioning of precipitation and irrigation water into evaporation and transpiration; the soil water and groundwater storage; the transport of water stable isotopes through the soil. In this research we present the results of the analysis and show the potentiality of GEOSPACE informatics infrastructure.