See where water sits, frost settles and wind hits in a paddock

Every grower knows roughly where their paddocks pond after a big rain and which hollows frost first. Knowing it roughly is one thing. Seeing it drawn on the paddock, with an area beside each patch, is what lets you plan around it.

Phase Spatial now has a simulator that runs rain, a frost night or wind over a paddock's own ground.

Open the paddock in 3D

Go to More → Spatial and open a paddock. On the Layers step, switch the map from Map to 3D. The paddock stands up as ground, with whichever layer is switched on laid over it: yield, soil, EM or vigour.

Along the bottom is one bar. Choose Rain, Frost or Wind, set it, and press the one button.

Rain: where the water goes

Choose how many millimetres fell, how long it fell over, and the ground: sand, loam, clay or already wet. Press Run the rain.

Rain falls on the paddock, the slopes shed, the low lines run and the hollows fill. Then the rain stops and the draining plays, so water left lying can be told from water passing through.

Afterwards Phase says how much soaked in, how much ran off the paddock and how much is still lying. Each pond is numbered on the ground and listed with its size and depth. If the farm has rain records, its three biggest days are offered as starting amounts.

Frost: where the cold air collects

Set the forecast low, how much colder you reckon your hollows run than open ground, and how long the night is. Press Run the night.

Phase works out from the lie of the land where cold air drains to and collects, and plays the night from sunset to sunrise. Frost starts in the deepest hollow and creeps out along the low ground. At the end it says how many hectares are at or below zero by sunrise, and about what time the first frost comes.

Wind: what stands in it

Wind takes one setting: where the wind is from. The ground is shaded by how open it stands to that wind, bare where rising ground upwind gives shelter and darkest on a rise in the full wind. If you have a weather station connected, its latest direction is offered.

Problem areas, biggest first

Each run picks out its patches: ponds left lying, ground that frosts, rises in the full wind. They are numbered on the ground, biggest first, and listed with their size. Press one in the list to fly to it.

What it is and is not

This matters, so Phase says it on screen too. The simulator is modelled from the shape of the land. It is not measured.

• It shows which way water moves and where it sits, not exact depths.
• For frost, where the cold collects comes from the ground. How cold it gets is the forecast low and your own setting. It is a pattern, not a thermometer.
• Wind reads the shape of the land only.
• Unless the paddock has its own survey or RTK elevation, the ground is a 30 metre satellite model, so on very flat country the lines are a guide.

Use it to decide where to go and look, where a drain might pay, or which part of a paddock to keep a frost-sensitive crop out of. Then check it against what you have seen with your own eyes.

Phase Spatial comes with Phase Ultra. The same ground also sits under yield maps in 3D in Yield Centre.

Built on the records already in Phase

The simulator is part of Phase Spatial, which sits inside the same app as the rest of the farm. It uses the paddock boundaries you already have, the yield, soil and elevation layers already saved against each paddock, your own rain records and your weather station's wind. The zones and prescriptions you build from what you find are made in the same place.