The usefulness of L-band radiometer observations for the retrieval of near-surface soil moisture has already been demonstrated in many studies. Unfortunately, the ability to estimate soil moisture from these remotely sensed observations is hampered by the infeasibility to characterize the roughness of the soil surface. Given the difficulty to measure in situ soil roughness parameters, improved ...

L-band brightness predicted by the land surface process/radiobrightness (LSP/R) model for prairie grassland appears to be somewhat lower than expected [1]. A crucial reason for the underestimate of the L-band brightness is that the soil surface was treated as smooth. In this paper, surface scattering of the soil determined by the IEM model is incorporated into the LSP/R model to examine its imp...

We study the response of the land-surface to prescribed atmospheric forcing for 31 May 1978 at Cabauw, Netherlands, using the land-surface scheme from the Coupled Atmospheric boundary layer-Plant-Soil (CAPS) model. Results from model runs show realistic daytime surface fluxes are produced using a canopy conductance formulation derived from Cabauw data (for 1987, a different year), and un-tuned ...

[1] In soil‐mantled steeplands, soil motions associated with creep, ravel, rain splash, soil slips, tree throw, and rodent activity are patchy and intermittent and involve widely varying travel distances. To describe the collective effect of these motions, we formulate a nonlocal expression for the soil flux. This probabilistic formulation involves upslope and downslope convolutions of land sur...

Soil moisture can significantly influence atmospheric evolution. However the soil moisture state predicted by land surface models, and subsequently used as the boundary condition in atmospheric models, is often unrealistic. New remote sensing technologies are able to observe surface soil moisture at the scales and coverage required by numerical weather prediction (NWP), and there is potential t...

The Kalman filter assimilation technique is applied to a simplified soil moisture model for retrieval of the soil moisture profile from near-surface soil moisture measurements. First, the simplified soil moisture model is developed, based on an approximation to the Buckingham–Darcy equation. This model is then used in a 12month one-dimensional field application, with updating at 1-, 5-, 10-, an...

Quantifying crop residue cover on the soil surface is important for improving estimates of surface energy balance, net primary productivity, nutrient cycling, and carbon sequestration. Quantifying crop residue cover is also an important factor in controlling soil erosion and evaluating the effectiveness of conservation tillage practices. By reducing the movement of eroded soil into streams and ...

[1] A multi-scale soil moisture and temperature monitoring network, consisting of 55 soil moisture and temperature measurement stations, has been established in central Tibetan Plateau (TP). In this study, the station-averaged surface soil moisture data from the network are used to evaluate four soil moisture products retrieved from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-Earth Observing Sys...

[1] We perform two 23 year simulations using a regional climate model coupled with the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Land Model version 3.5 (RegCM‐CLM) to investigate land‐atmosphere coupling in the continental United States during the cold season (October–April) and the role of soil water phase. One simulation allows the land surface to interact freely (RunI) while the oth...

Soil fumigants are becoming an important source of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in air, especially in some agricultural areas. In this study, we used thiourea to construct a reactive surface barrier (RSB) at the soil surface for reducing 1,3-dichloropropene (1,3-D) volatilization. The agrochemical thiourea could rapidly transform volatile 1,3-D to nonvolatile products via an SN2 nucleophil...