04::Utils

Introduction

The Utils cluster provides components with miscellaneous functionalities to serve different purposes.

These tools are provided to ease the drawing process for the users.

Component Usage

Please refer to the following sections for each component from this cluster. Some components would require information from component in the Soil.

Climate Evapotranspiration

This component provides an estimation of water information in the soil, such as the monthly evapotranspiration rate, based on the climate data of a particular location and soil information.

Parameter	Abbreviation	I/O	Optional	Explanation
Precipitation	P		No	Monthly precipitation at the given location.
Temperature	T		No	Monthly average temperature (°C) at the given location.
Latitude	Lat		No	Latitude of the given location.
SoilInfo	soilinfo		No	Info about the current soil based on given content ratio, using output from the Soil Analysis component.
SoilDepth	soilDep		Yes	The depth (m) of the target soil.
Potential Evapotranspiration (Corrected)	PET.corr			Corrected evapotranspiration (mm/month).
Actual Evapotranspiration	ETa			Real evapotranspiration (mm/month).
Surplus	SUR			The water that is not evapotranspired or held in the soil (mm).
Deficit	DEF			The difference between the maximum evapotranspiration and the water in the system (mm).
Reserve	RES			The ammount of water reserved in the soil (mm).
MaxReserve	maxRES			The maximum ammount of water can be reserved in the soil (mm). When this value is reached, the soil is fully saturated.

Bound Morph (Fan)

Radial diagram is a key type of diagram used in soil drawings. It is commonly employed to depict the soil conditions during various times and seasons. In this diagram, instead of using rectangular shapes, the soil triangles must conform to a fan shape. To address this requirement, we develop this component that seamlessly transform the soil diagram from a rectangle into a fan shape, which ensures that the soil triangles precisely fill the fan-shaped regions within the radial diagram.

The concept behind morphing involves converting points from Cartesian coordinates (rectangular shape) into points in polar coordinates (fan shape). Consequently, in addition to the defined fan shape, the component requires a rectangular soil base as input. This rectangular soil base serves as the foundation for the transformation process.

Parameter	Abbreviation	I/O	Optional	Explanation
Soil Base	soilBase		No	The base object used for soil diagram generation， using output from the Soil Base component.
Soil Geo	soilG		No	Any line- or polyline-based geometries from the soil system.
Target Fan	tFan		No	The target closed fan shape curve to morph to.
Transformed Geo	fSoilG			The morphed soil geometries inside the given fan shape.
Transformed Plane	fP			The based plane for the polar coordinate system used during the mapping process.

• Notes on Fan Shape: The tFan parameter is designed to receive a perfect and planar fan shape as input. This fan shape should consist of two arcs with the same center point and two lines with equal distances. While the component may not throw an error if different shapes are used, such as arcs with different center points, it will transform the shape into a perfect fan shape, which may result in triangles outside of the intended boundary.

Soil Information

The component exports the soil information in text format.

Parameter	Abbreviation	I/O	Optional	Explanation
Soil Info	soilInfo		No	The soil info, using optput from the Soil Analysis component.
Soil Info Text	soilText			Soil information in text, can be visualized with the TAG component.

Demo File

The Utils Demo (.gh file) is a grasshopper file that contains example definitions for the use of Climate Evapotranspiration component and Bound Morph component and Soil Info component. Please see the documentation section for more details.