Local estimates of available water capacity and effect of measurement errors on the spatial estimates and their uncertainties

The purpose of this work was to: (i) propose a methodology to infer local estimates of the available water capacity (AWC) at a plot from a few measurements in laboratory of AWC carried out on horizons of a pit on the same plot, (ii) examine the effect of measurement errors on spatial estimates of AWC and the associated uncertainties. For each horizon identified in the pit, the water content was determined at field capacity and at the permanent wilting point, and thus AWC. 47 soundings were carried out on a regular grid covering the plot. For each sounding, an AWC value was estimated by matching sounding horizons to the pit horizons. Laboratory measurements of AWC on 14 sites were used to validate the 47 local estimates. Statistics such as correlation coefficient, mean error and root mean square error are promising at 0.84, 4.0 mm and 17.5 mm, respectively. The spatialization of AWC was carried out by ordinary kriging, considering or ignoring the measurement errors on AWC. The precision of AWC estimates allowed making evident that accounting for measurement errors provided estimates that were more precise. This result, confirmed by the prediction interval coverage probability statistic, underlined that taking into account measurement errors in spatial modeling is an effective way to reduce the confidence interval of any estimate. These results suggest that it would be better to fix the nugget based on a preliminary test on the measurement error rather than to fix it based on the experimental variogram.