Estimación de la humedad del suelo mediante técnicas de asimilación de datos.

Soil moisture is a key state variable in the dynamics of dissimilar processes and natural phenomena. This, together with the development of new methods of estimation of this variable at different scales in space- time, has led to the use of assimilation techniques to improve their estimates. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the potential of such tools in the estimation of soil moisture profiles from the assimilation of surface moisture values in a simulation model. To this end is performed a synthetic study based on the use of Richards's equation for modeling the movement of water flow in the soil. The use of assimilation technique significantly reduces the error estimated profiles with respect to the real ones, and with it avoiding the possible divergence of the solution. In particular the technique Kalman Filter assimilation obtained superior results, in less time, with respect to the technique of Direct Insertion assimilation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]