Verification Study of a Numerical Greenhouse Microclimate Model

ABSTRACT A numerical one-dimensional model was designed to simulate the diurnal changes of the greenhouse en-vironment. The model consists of: a soil layer, a vegeta-tion layer, an air layer and a cover. The thermal radiative, sensible, latent and conductive heat fluxes were modeled in each layer in terms of its unknown temperature and vapor pressure. In order to obtain flexibility and accuracy of the model, sophisticated models were adopted to simulate each of the greenhouse sublayers and a theoretical method was proposed to describe the water diffusion through stomata as a function of the environmental parameters. Numerical experiments were conducted to test the sen-sitivity of the model to some parameters. The results in-dicate the necessity to properly initialize the model and to determine an accurate inside air transfer coefficient of sensible and latent heat. An observational study was performed in order to test the ability of the model to properly describe the greenhouse microclimate. Good agreement was obtained between predicted and observed temperatures and humidities.