Models estimating surface energy fluxes over partial canopy cover with thermal remote sensing must account for significant differences between the radiometric temperatures and turbulent exchange rates associated with the soil and canopy components of the thermal pixel scene. Recent progress in separating soil and canopy temperatures from dual angle composite radiometric temperature measurements...

In 1991, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) established its Soil Moisture–Soil Temperature (SM–ST) Pilot Network consisting of 21 stations in 19 states in the contiguous United States. At each station, soil temperatures were measured at up to six different depths from 5.08 to 203.20 cm (or 2–80 in.) below the surface. Before 1997, the observa...

Seasonal changes over 2 years (2004–2006) in soil moisture content ( v) of frozen alpine frost meadow soils of the QinghaiTibet plateau permafrost region under three different levels of vegetation cover were investigated. Vegetation cover and air temperature changes had significant effects (synergistic effect) on v and its distribution in the soil profile. During periods of soil freezing or tha...

FengYun-3B (FY-3B) soil moisture product, retrieved from passive microwave brightness temperature data based on the Qp model, has rarely been applied at the catchment and region scale. One of the reasons for this is its coarse spatial resolution (25-km). The study in this paper presented a new method to obtain a high spatial resolution soil moisture product by downscaling FY-3B soil moisture pr...

Seeds beneath the soil sense the changing environment to time germination and seedling emergence with the optimum time of year for survival. Environmental signals first impact with the seed at the seed coat. To investigate whether seed coats have a role in environmental sensing we investigated their ultraweak photon emission (UPE) under the variable temperature, relative humidity and oxygen con...

This paper describes a project for evaluation of global warming's impacts on soil carbon dynamics in Japanese forest ecosystems. We started a soil warming experiment in late 2008 in a 55-year-old evergreen broad-leaved forest at the boundary between the subtropical and warm-temperate biomes in southern Japan. We used infrared carbon-filament heat lamps to increase soil temperature by about 2.5 ...

The variation of different ecosystems on the terrestrial carbon balance is predicted to be large. We investigated a typical arid region with widespread saline/alkaline soils, and evaluated soil respiration of different agricultural and natural ecosystems. Soil respiration for five ecosystems together with soil temperature, soil moisture, soil pH, soil electric conductivity and soil organic carb...

Pesticide volatilization from agricultural soils is one of the main pathways in which pesticides are dispersed in the environment and affects ecosystems including human welfare. Thus, it is necessary to have accurate knowledge of the various physical and chemical mechanisms that affect volatilization rates from field soils. A verification of the influence of soil moisture modeling on the simula...

This paper presents a hypothesis regarding the fundamental role of soil moisture conditions in land-atmosphere interactions. We propose that wet soil moisture conditions over any large region should be associated with relatively large boundary layer moist static energy, which favors the occurrence of more rainfall. Since soil moisture conditions themselves reflect past occurrence of rainfall, t...

The objective of this study was to explore the influence of pyrolysis temperature on the physicochemical properties of biochar synthesized from durian wood (Durio zibethinus) sawdust. Surface morphological features, including the porosity and BET surface area of biochars, provide appropriate dimensions for growing clusters of microorganisms with excellent water retention capacity in soil. Oxyge...