Leaf water potential, leaf relative water content, and relative transpiration of barley were determined daily under greenhouse conditions at 3 growth stages: tillering to boot, boot to heading, and heading to maturity. The leaf moisture characteristic curve (relative water content versus leaf water potential) was the same for leaves of the same age growing in the same environment for the first ...

Upon an increase of moisture, unsaturated soil may collapse or swell, depending on the loading state and history. This important characteristic must be realistically reproduced by a constitutive model aimed for practical applications. In addition to collapse/swelling, other essential features, such as deformation and failure following arbitrary shearing paths, must also be realistically reprodu...

Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. [1] Atmospheric models include land surface parameteriza-tions of heat and moisture fluxes. Most parameterizations ...

This paper investigates the feasibility of estimating large-scale soil moisture profiles and related land surface variables from 1.4 GHz (L-band) passive microwave measurements, using variational data assimilation. Our four-dimensional assimilation algorithm takes into account both model and measurement uncertainties and provides dynamically consistent interpolation and extrapolation of remote ...

In this paper a novel approach is presented for generating RDF graphs of arbitrary complexity from various spreadsheet layouts. Currently, none of the available spreadsheet-to-RDF wrappers supports cross tables and tables where data is not aligned in rows. Similar to RDF123, XLWrap is based on template graphs where fragments of triples can be mapped to specific cells of a spreadsheet. Additiona...

Guaranteed Annuity Options (GAOs) are options available to holders of certain pension policies. Under these contracts, policyholders contribute premiums into a fund managed by the insurer. At retirement, the policyholders buy life annuities at a guaranteed rate provided by the original insurer, or annuitize with another insurer. If the guaranteed annuity rates are better than the prevailing rat...

With the launch of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission on 2 November 2009, there is a new opportunity for global near-surface soil moisture mapping from space [1-2]. Along with its innovative sensor design, a 2-dimensional array of L-band passive microwave radiometers distributed on a Y-shaped synthetic aperture antenna, a new generation of retrieva...

Soil moisture is an important environmental variable in regulating energy fluxes and water infiltration near the soil surface. This makes it a significant parameter in meteorological and climate modelling applications. While ground measurement of soil moisture at a large spatial scale is cumbersome and time-consuming, remote sensing offers the advantage of frequent observations in time and spac...