The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, developed by the European Space Agency (ESA), will be launched in the second half of 2009. It will be the first L-band (~1.4 GHz) passive microwave satellite specifically designed for global soil moisture observations, with an expected accuracy for the retrieved soil moisture of ~0.04 m/m. While passive microwave observations have been widely...

A long term data acquisition effort of profile soil moisture is under way in southwestern France at 13 automated weather stations. This ground network was developed in order to validate remote sensing and model soil moisture estimates. In this paper, both those in situ observations and a synthetic data set covering continental France are used to test a simple method to retrieve root zone soil m...

[1] We present here a simple and robust framework for quantifying the effective sensor depth of cosmic ray soil moisture neutron probes such that reliable water fluxes may be computed from a time series of cosmic ray soil moisture. In particular, we describe how the neutron signal depends on three near-surface hydrogen sources: surface water, soil moisture, and lattice water (water in minerals ...

Soil moisture is a critical hydrological variable that links the terrestrial water, energy and carbon cycles. Global and regional observations of soil moisture are needed to estimate the water and energy fluxes at the land surface, to quantify the net carbon flux in boreal landscapes, to enhance weather and climate forecast skill and to develop improved flood prediction and drought monitoring c...

The influence of soil moisture in thermal infrared emissivity is a known fact, but poorly studied in the past. An experiment for quantifying the dependence of emissivity on soil moisture has been designed. Six samples of superficial horizons of different Mediterranean soil types have been selected. Their emissivity has been measured at different soil water contents, using the twolid variant of ...

Surface soil moisture content is highly variable in both space and time. Remote sensing can provide an effective methodology for mapping surface moisture content over large areas but ground based measurements are required to test its reliability and to calibrate retrieval algorithms. Recently, we had the opportunity to design and perform an experiment aimed at jointly acquiring measurements of ...

globally, soil erosion is one of the most important environmental problems which is threaten soil and water resources. soil properties are main parameters to affect runoff and soil erosion processes. so, this study was conducted to investigate the effects of some soil properties on runoff and soil erosion in the forest lands located in vicinity of sari city. rainfall simulator was set in 15 ran...

A multilayer soil model for retrieving soil moisture content using the Integral Equation Method (IEM) is investigated in this paper. The total reflection coefficients of the natural soil are obtained using the multilayer model, and volumetric scattering is approximated by the internal reflections between layers. The surface reflection terms in IEM model are replaced by the total reflection coef...

Nineteen Mediterranean natural soils with a wide range of properties and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) artificial soil were used to assess the influence of soil properties on the results of avoidance and reproduction tests carried out with the soil collembolan species Folsomia candida. Compared to natural soils, the OECD soil was mostly rejected by individual...

Humic substances (HS) reportedly enhance moisture retention of soil. However, no information is available as to the effects of HS on sand-based golf course putting greens. HS have acidic functional groups (COOH) that are reaction sites on the molecule. An greenhouse experiment was conducted to evaluate the effect that the acidic functional groups in humic acid, tannic acid and citric acid have ...