research

Research Spotlight: T-REX and the Quest for Sustainable Almonds

USDA photo of an almond orchard in Livingston, CA. Photo by Lance Cheung.

A meteorological field project is partnering with orchards to reduce water use in California’s dry climate

California is one of the world’s key agricultural regions. However, the highly variable “boom-and-bust” rainfall pattern of its Mediterranean climate, combined with massive overuse of groundwater regionally, threatens both the state’s farmers and the population’s drinking water. Irrigation accounts for nearly 70% of groundwater withdrawals in the state.

The Tree-Crop Remote Sensing of Evapotranspiration Experiment (T-REX) aims to help farmers monitor and sustainably reduce water use in California, with lessons for farmers in Mediterranean climate regions around the world. You can read about the project in this BAMS paper.

We spoke with Nicholas (Nico) Bambach, PhD, T-REX project co-lead, to find out more.

Bambach canoeing in the Amazon. Photo courtesy of Nico Bambach.>>

Nico Bambach canoeing

What are the aims of T-REX?

Mediterranean climate regions, such as Chile’s Central Valley and California’s San Joaquin Valley, are only about 3% of the Earth’s land surface [yet] are notable for their high biodiversity and productive agriculture. Most crops grown in this climate rely on irrigation to satisfy spring and summer crop water demands.

Alarming warming trends and unprecedented droughts have challenged farmers in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Australia, South Africa, and Chile since I started college in the mid-2000s. As an Agricultural Engineering student, I kept hearing about the need to increase irrigation efficiencies and better manage water resources. … Near two decades later, I found my place within a diverse team, tackling questions related to these themes. [We are] using holistic and interdisciplinary research approaches … to identify how we can help and work with stakeholders interested in using new technologies to become more efficient with their water use.

How did the project begin, and how does it work?

With strong support from Bill Kustas, Martha Anderson, and Andrew McElrone, Kyle Knipper and I grew the T-REX project from our postdoctoral work on a similar UC Davis project focused on vineyards—GRAPEX, the Grape Remote Sensing Atmospheric Profile and Evapotranspiration eXperiment.

GRAPEX is a hands-on research project aiming to help farmers manage vineyards using satellites, so they can reduce the amount of water needed to produce California wines. We have developed tools that use satellites and other technologies to monitor how much water vineyards are using and if the plants are under stress. To do this, we collect data from different wine-growing regions.

Up close, we measure how leaves and vines take in and release carbon and water and how much moisture is in the soil at various depths. Using special sensors on a tall tower, we can track how wind moves and how much water vapor or heat goes up or down. This helps us determine how much water plants are using, how much heat the ground is giving off, or how much carbon dioxide plants absorb. We also use planes or drones to gather information from above, covering areas as small as a few centimeters to many kilometers. Then, we work with wineries to identify the best way to provide this information for their decision-making.

The T-REX project is an expansion of GRAPEX. We use what we learned from wine grapes to apply to almonds, pistachios, and olives. … Considering the importance of the almond industry in California, we decided to focus our efforts [at the beginning] on developing accessible tools to inform irrigation decisions [for almond orchards] based on satellite observations. … We are learning more about how different environments, crop types, and agricultural management can impact the potential of these satellite-based tools.

What is it like partnering with farmers?

Working in commercial farms is challenging yet also rewarding. Every farm has its own way of operating machinery, and we must constantly adapt so that our field research team and equipment are not in their way. Summer days can be scorching, but we are doing many campaigns to ensure we understand the impact of using satellite-based irrigation recommendations at every level. We are quantifying plant stress, orchard productivity, fruit quality parameters, soil-health parameters, and many others. Our results are promising, and we are excited about that. Also, working directly with farmers gives us huge motivation; we hear the need for better tools to support sustainable farming. Growers are trying their best to run their farms not only for profit but also because they are proud of what they do and want to do it well.

<< A researcher climbs a micrometeorological flux tower at the T-REX field site in Woodland, California. Photo courtesy of Nico Bambach.

Every crop is managed differently, and plant species respond differently to such management; finding methods to model that well can be challenging. Ecological studies usually deal with ecosystem responses to certain environmental conditions. In our case, we [also need] to understand how human decisions affect the crop and agroecosystem responses observed.

… We are evolving to better integrate our understanding of the carbon and nitrogen cycles in California’s agroecosystems. Adapting theory and tools to these landscapes is more challenging than it might seem. Yet we are excited to work with farmers on how to grow food, promote soil health, and identify potential climate mitigation opportunities.

How has the project grown, and what are your hopes for the future?

We have expanded into what we envision as a long-term regional-scale observatory of California’s agroecosystems, [becoming] the Crop Sensing Group hosted by the ARS-USDA Sustainable Agriculture Water System Unit in Davis, California. We [are] a diverse, fun, and motivated group of more than thirty people working on critical fundamental and applied research questions revolving around how to do agriculture sustainably in Mediterranean climate regions. We aim to advance our capabilities to integrate across spatial and temporal scale crop-sensing datasets for climate resilience and solutions.

Providing growers with timely and readily available access to crop water use data will help them use water more efficiently. Given how scarce water has become in California, we hope that our project releases some pressure on such a critical resource as water. We believe that will be better for the environment and our communities[—although the pathways are not always clear]. For example, such “saved water” could [be used to grow] more food instead of [becoming] available for the environment or other uses.

The T-REX project intertwines with my personal and professional growth. It is like a kid I get to co-parent with many other people I enjoy having around. It’s also “cool” to think that we are following the path that people like John Norman, Bill Kustas, Martha Anderson, and many others started. … [It] is a huge responsibility and a privilege.

Photo at top: USDA photo of an almond orchard in Livingston, CA. Photo by Lance Cheung.

Stand Up for NOAA Research — The Time to Act Is Now

AMS and NWA logos

A Statement of the American Meteorological Society in Partnership with the National Weather Association

The administration’s 2026 budget passback plan, currently under consideration, eliminates NOAA’s Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Office and its 10 research laboratories and 16 affiliated Cooperative Institutes, and moves the few remaining research efforts to different NOAA departments. If enacted, the passback would close all of NOAA’s weather, climate, and ocean Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes.  

The speed at which these decisions are being made translates into little to no opportunity for feedback or consideration of long-term impacts. Without NOAA research, National Weather Service (NWS) weather models and products will stagnate, observational data collection will be reduced, public outreach will decrease, undergraduate and graduate student support will drop, and NOAA funding for universities will plummet. In effect, the scientific backbone and workforce needed to keep weather forecasts, alerts, and warnings accurate and effective will be drastically undercut, with unknown — yet almost certainly disastrous — consequences for public safety and economic health. As key stakeholders, AMS and NWA stand ready to provide our expertise so that the U.S. can maintain its competitiveness in the years ahead.   

If you believe in the importance of NOAA research for maintaining and improving NWS forecasts and services to the nation then the time to act is now. Reach out to your elected representatives and share your concerns.

NOAA Research: Left: Flight operations (credit: NOAA Photo Library on Flickr); center: NOAA/National Severe Storms Laboratory X-Pol Mobile radar after a storm has passed overhead (credit: NOAA Photo Library on Flickr); right: Lightning over National Severe Storms Laboratory mobile mesonet, Oklahoma, Enid, May 15, 2009 (credit: NOAA Photo Library on Flickr)

To envision the disastrous impact of this plan, one only needs to see what NOAA research has provided to the U.S. taxpayer and imagine where we would be without it. For example, the work of NOAA Research Labs and Cooperative Institutes:

  • Sparked and developed our national Doppler radar network. NOAA research proved that Doppler weather radars are critical for severe thunderstorm warnings. This research led directly to the creation of the national Doppler weather radar network, which provides the radar observations you see on television and on your phone, and which meteorologists use to keep you safe during hazardous and severe weather. The next generation of weather radar is now being developed in the same laboratories. 
  • Feeds National Weather Service forecasts. NOAA research created and continuously improves the two computer weather models used by the National Weather Service to generate hourly and daily weather forecasts. One model focuses on predicting severe weather and is used extensively by the transportation and energy sectors. Another model predicts global weather patterns across the world for the 3- to 14-day range, with forecast outlooks used by farmers, ranchers, and water managers.    
  • Helps us respond to hurricanes. The NOAA Hurricane Hunter aircraft that fly into Atlantic Ocean hurricanes collect essential observations to improve forecasts of hurricane landfall location and intensity, leading to better evacuation decisions and emergency response. This directly impacts public safety during extreme weather events. 
  • Helps us track airborne hazards. NOAA research developed and continuously improves models to track the release of hazardous materials, including toxins, wildfire smoke, and volcanic ash, to keep people out of danger–as well as creating specialized instruments to detect those airborne hazards.  
  • Keeps water treatment plants on track. NOAA implemented and operates a lake hypoxia warning system to help keep drinking water potable in the Great Lakes region.
  • Warns communities of tsunamis. NOAA researchers developed and maintain the real-time tsunami monitoring system that plays a critical role in tsunami forecasting and helps keep coastal communities safe.  
  • Helps farmers and managers plan. NOAA created and runs an El-Niño information system to assist in seasonal forecasting of temperature and rainfall across the U.S. This helps farmers, ranchers, water managers, and electric utility companies make better decisions.
  • Keeps water supplies more secure. NOAA research developed and continuously advances water information systems to better manage large reservoirs that supply water to towns, cities, and farmers across the nation. 
  • Addresses climate change. NOAA research has developed and improved climate models, the U.S. Climate Reference Network, and monitoring stations to learn about our changing climate and its causes.

Imagine what will happen to tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings if we don’t have a robust national weather radar network? What will happen to reservoir management when critical information on rainfall and runoff goes missing? What will happen when Hurricane Hunter aircraft are delayed or data from their instruments are not available to improve hurricane track and landfall forecasts? NOAA research affects the lives of American taxpayers every day. It is vital to the work of the National Weather Service and the NOAA mission to predict the environment and share that information with businesses, communities, state and local governments, and citizens.   

NOAA Research costs every American citizen less than a cup of coffee a year, with large returns on this small investment. This is a prime example of effective government — one that helps grow the economy and keeps people safe. 

Now is the time to reach out to your elected representatives. Consider installing the 5 Calls app on your phone to assist you. To find your Congressional Representative or Senator you can use these resources:

View this statement on the AMS website.

How is Weather Research Changing?

A 2024 AMS Summer Community Meeting highlight

The AMS Summer Community Meeting (SCM) drew exceptional attendance and engagement this year as people across sectors helped inform a major upcoming report on the Weather Enterprise. The AMS Weather Enterprise Study will provide a comprehensive picture of the shifting landscape of weather-related fields to inform our joint future. At the 2024 SCM, working groups discussed what they’d found about key issues facing the enterprise, and asked for feedback from the community. 

Here are a few takeaways from the Research Enterprise working group, as reported by Daniel Rothenberg of Brightband.

Photo courtesy of Daniel Rothenberg.

How has the weather research landscape shifted in the last decade or so?

Two of the most important shifts have been a movement of exploratory and applied research from the public to the private sector, and the rise in importance of “data science” and other hybrid roles blending a mixture of domain expertise and broader engineering and technical skills. 

Possibly the biggest example of these shifts coming together has been the advent of AI-based weather forecasting tools, although it also shows in trends such as the rise of private companies operating earth observation platforms.

What were the principal themes that came out of your working group’s discussions?

One major theme we discussed was the balance of responsibilities across the traditional weather enterprise. Initiatives such as building and launching satellite constellations or developing new weather models were at one point solely within the remit of the public sector (due to complexity and cost), but are now commonly undertaken by the private sector – sometimes even at start-up companies.

This re-balancing opens as many opportunities as it does challenges, and leads to another major theme: how we can best prepare for the workforce needs of today and tomorrow. Meteorologists will increasingly need to apply technical skills such as software development and data science alongside ones from the social sciences; preparing our current and future workforce for these demands will be a challenge in its own right.

A third major theme is that the weather enterprise is getting bigger. We’re not just a community of meteorologists anymore. Increasingly, critical work related to weather, water, climate, and their impacts on society is being undertaken beyond the traditional boundaries of our enterprise. There is a significant opportunity to improve society’s resilience if we as a community are able to build relationships with the new institutions working on these issues in a collaborative, interdisciplinary manner.

What are the main challenges you have identified?

Better accounting for how we ought to invest limited – and declining – federal resources will be a significant and contentious challenge, only complicated by the shifts in priorities and capabilities across the enterprise.

Those shifts motivate a second key challenge, which is clarifying who in the enterprise is accountable for, or has ownership over, certain areas. For example, NOAA makes available nearly all of the observations used in its operational forecast models, with some exceptions for proprietary data from commercial entities. But as more private companies try to sell data to NOAA, how will this balance hold? What if those private companies move towards selling actual weather modeling capabilities or services – perhaps a proprietary AI-based weather model – to the government? In the case of expanding commercial data purchases, who is responsible for maintaining and improving our data assimilation capabilities? 

Coordinating many actors across the enterprise, in a manner that most effectively serves our mission to society, will be a key challenge we must navigate in the coming years.

What preliminary recommendations or future directions have you discussed?

Our tentative recommendations revolve around building robustness. We encourage academic organizations who train our future meteorologists to consider how to prepare these students to work in a multidisciplinary capacity, and to embrace data science skills. Not everyone needs to be an interdisciplinary scientist, but it’s vital that our students learn how to apply their deep domain knowledge as part of a team of such individuals.

We also acknowledge that the rise of AI/ML techniques is changing the demands of our computing and data infrastructure. Not only must our workforce learn to adapt to these technologies, but we must consider how the enterprise will support enabling them: for example, by ensuring that in addition to large, traditional high-performance computing resources, we provide access to GPUs and similar tools. As part of this re-evaluation, we must evolve the ways in which we as a community define our priorities for federal research funding

What did you hear from the community at the SCM?

We thank the community for the warm reception to our assessments at the Summer Community Meeting. Many of the themes we touched on – the re-balancing of capabilities across the enterprise, the emergence of AI/ML and its implications, as well as core workforce development concerns – were echoed across many other working groups, underscoring their importance.

Within our group, we also discussed the growing importance of convergence science, which was echoed several times throughout the meeting. Convergence science, which involves coordinating diverse, interdisciplinary research teams with real stakeholders to solve societally relevant problems, is likely to be an important mechanism of translational research in the future, but we (and others at the meeting) identified a need for federal agencies to devote more resources earmarked for this sort of work in order to complement traditional, siloed funding programs.

Want to join a Weather Enterprise Study working group? Email [email protected].

About the Weather Enterprise Study

The AMS Policy Program, working closely with the volunteer leadership of the Commission on the Weather, Water, and Climate Enterprise, is conducting a two-year effort (2023-2025) to assess how well the weather enterprise is performing, and to potentially develop new recommendations for how it might serve the public even better. Learn more here, give us your input via Google Forms, or get involved by contacting [email protected].  

About the AMS Summer Community Meeting

The AMS Summer Community Meeting (SCM) is a special time for professionals from academia, industry, government, and NGOs to come together to discuss broader strategic priorities, identify challenges to be addressed and opportunities to collaborate, and share points of view on pressing topics. The SCM provides a unique, informal setting for constructive deliberation of current issues and development of a shared vision for the future. The 2024 Summer Community Meeting took place August 5-6 in Washington, DC, and focused special attention on the Weather Enterprise, with opportunities for the entire community to learn about, discuss, debate, and extend some of the preliminary findings coming from the AMS Weather Enterprise Study.