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Garden with Insight v1.0 Help: depth fraction
Precipitation is normally measured in inches or millimeters, but really the rain or snow that falls fills up a
volume. We make an assumption that rain and snow fall evenly, and we automatically divide the volume
of precipitation by the area of the ground when we say "inches" or "millimeters" of
rain or snow.
This simulation also assumes even distribution to simulate water in the soil. It maintains an amount of
water in each soil layer in terms of the height (not the volume) of the
water. Since all the soil layers have the same area, we can disregard the area part of volume and
compare the height only.
However, this produces a problem: each soil layer has a different
height, so when you look at the amounts of water you can't compare them evenly. Knowing how well the
soil is filled with water relative to how much water it can
hold is very important. If you have three glasses of different heights and they are all filled different
amounts, how can you compare how full they are? So some aspects divide the height of water in
each soil layer by the height of the soil layer, giving you a height (or depth) fraction, which means how full each soil layer is. You can then
compare these numbers easily to see how the water is distributed in the soil
profile.
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