Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Rain - Underground

Rain in Ann Arbor!



Ann Arbor saw between 1 and 3 inches of rain on Sunday, June 14th. It's interesting to see what the rain does to freshly (~two week) turned soil.

Playing around with imagemagick a bit more. I'm splicing a 100x100px section and getting the 'average brightness' of it. Scans are taken every 5 minutes, but to keep things simple I'm only sampling every third image, or roughly every 15 minutes.

Then I repeat that process 100px down, continuing until we get to the bottom of the image. Imagemagick spits out a pile of numbers like so:
Reading DateRainfall (in.)0-100100-200200-300300-400400-500500-600600-700700-800800-900
0:00:0009598.3313316.910462.310667.810865.210513.710696.410353.210342.7
0:15:0009460.7113131.910450.910675.110881.210513.110743.110371.110354.6
0:30:0009237.3912896.310400.810698.710877.810542.110744.610392.110368.6
0:45:0009155.2312850.51031510650.410851.810505.710729.310370.210382.1
1:00:0009487.3212982.910343.610668.1108471051210734.310374.610384
1:15:0009519.4312857.810288.210630.310810.610464.210685.210365.910339.7
1:30:0009623.3412937.310331.210609.410802.610485.510736.810393.210421.1
1:45:0009516.3912664.110087.510552.410765.210437.910715.710369.710345.9
2:00:0009497.9712638.110084.910480.210656.910417.910720.810366.610347.4
2:15:0009586.5812693.710088.410481.710597.610347.910712.910380.310333.1
2:30:0009770.5712844.19968.4610395.310489.610198.710651.910324.410265.1
2:45:0009660.312739.610046.810414.710511.41018810619.810355.510314.7
3:00:0009605.2812698.810024.210384.210493.6101821059410318.910277.6
3:15:0009569.2212469.810023.210386.910474.110120.610551.810289.610249.6
3:30:0009575.4412534.910039.61040910488.710132.110541.71027910242.2
3:45:0009509.712525.610005.710370.410443.810094.810502.810236.610190.7
4:00:0009598.0712539.19968.5510371.210460.410099.110510.910232.110183.5

Reading Date and Rainfall (in.) are coming from elsewhere. The first 100px is mostly black, this part of the scanner is above ground and since it's night there is little for the scanner's light to reflect off. A graph of the 400-500px region from 00:00 to 4:00:00 looks like:

The numbers above unfortunately represent the day prior to the rainfall. Whoops. In the morning I'll have numbers for the proper day and be able to compare them with data from the City of Ann Arbor's Rain Gauges. Some time later this week I'll post the results.

I'm wondering if I can show to some degree of reliability how far and how quickly the rain is penetrating into the soil with this setup. I guess I should build/buy some soil sensors at this point to compare : )

Also, currently using Imagemagick's identify -format '%[mean]' command to infer "image brightness", but I'm really not sure what the command is doing / how it comes up with the numbers it spits out....

So much to learn!

Updated: 
Comparison of rainfall vs. image brightness for June 14th. This is a 100px snapshot ~4 inches below the surface. Both the rainfall and image brightness values were remapped from 0 - 100.


I'm doing a couple things here that I'm pretty sure are bad ideas.
1. I'm analyzing the jpeg, not the original tiff file.
2. I'm analyzing a section of a copy of the original jpeg, more loss : )
3. I have no real clue what I'm doing with the math. I think I used the same method I used to remap and constrain light sensor values on an arduino project from years ago for this (return (x - in_min) * (out_max - out_min) / (in_max - in_min) + out_min;)...
4. Wheeeee!

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