SURFACE ENERGY COMPONENTS AND LAND CHARACTERISTICS OF A RICE PADDY

In South and Southeast Asia, rice is one of the major staple food crops. A steady diet of rice accounts for as much as 70% of the daily calorie intake for more than 2 billion people. Rice, however, is uniquely different from other crops. Cultivated under water its entire life, the fact that the crop is flooded substantially affects the land characteristics of the rice paddy field. Many meteorological, climatological, and air-quality models require land characteristics as input. Our research confirms that describing land as having characteristics derived from the cereal crop fields common to Western nations, as is currently being done in many "state-of-the-art" models, yields an inaccurate …