Water Cycle

The Water Cycle process is about what happens to the water that falls on a piece of land. Total rainfall is given by climate; the ecological question is what fraction of it the land uses (captures, infiltrates, holds, and cycles through plant and soil) versus what runs off, evaporates straight back, or drains uselessly through.

A well-functioning water cycle shows up in many of the indicators an experienced walker reads on the ground: spongy soil, slow puddles, deep root zones, riparian strips that hold their colour into a dry summer, valley bottoms that stay productive in drought. A poor water cycle shows up as runoff scars, capping, gullies, fields that brown a fortnight before their neighbours, ponds and ditches that flash full and then dry hard.

EcoIntel’s Water Cycle Index (WCI) scores this 0–100 per field. The weekly pixel-level score is a weighted blend of six satellite signals: canopy moisture (NDMI), vegetation vigour (EVI), radar backscatter (Sentinel-1 VH), the bare-soil and dry-residue indices (BSI, NPV), and ground cover. The parcel-level score is then produced by the model ensemble, which additionally reads seasonal variability (the coefficient of variation of NDVI, which is how holding through a dry spell registers), chlorophyll (MTCI) and terrain (slope, elevation).

Two things a reader might expect here are deliberately not inputs to the WCI. Land-surface temperature is discussed in the report as a reading of evaporative cooling, and topographic wetness drives parts of the opportunity and field-plan logic, but neither is used to compute the index itself. Soil-moisture products such as SMAP are not used in scoring at all.

When WCI is the limiting indicator for a field, the conversation is about infiltration, organic matter, ground cover, and landscape-position interventions (keyline patterns, riparian work, water-harvesting earthworks), not about irrigation.