WARM 2

WARM 2 is the new Cassandra environment to run rice simulations using the WARM model. The idea behind its design was to provide users with a friendly and powerful virtual rice field.

Compared to WARM 1:
- it allows users to buid their own WARM according to specific needs by including or excluding modules for the simulation of specific processes and by choosing - for most of them - from alternate approaches;
- it allows the simulation of more processes (e.g., agrochemical fate, grain quality, transplanting) and it received updates in most of its algorithms.

WARM 2 allows to simulate the following processes:
- rice growth and development (hourly or daily time step) (Confalonieri et al., 2009a,b);
- soil hydrology (cascading with travel time or Richiards' equation);
- diseases (blast and brown spot);
- agrochemicals fate;
- damages due to extreme weather events (spikelet sterility due to heat and cold shoks, lodging);
- pre-harvest grain quality (amylose, protein and starch contents, viscosity profile, chalkiness, cracking, head rice yield) (Cappelli et al., 2014);
- floodwater effect on vertical thermal profile (Confalonieri et al., 2005);
- transplanting (manual and mechanical) (Pagani et al., 2014).
The application allows running automatic calibration (standard and genetic simplex) and the assimilation of exogenous leaf area index data. Moreover, it has an integrated tool for the generation of climate change scenarios.

WARM 2 is one of the AgMIP rice models (Li et al., 2014), and was designed by following a component based architecture under the MS .NET framework.