Overly high intake of saturated fat is an international problem contributing to global health issues. Low-moisture snacks account for a nutritionally significant proportion of the saturated fat in the diet, making these foods a key target for improving consumers’ health. However, it is not currently feasible to maintain the same oxidative shelf life when replacing saturated fats with unsaturate...

Radar based surface soil moisture retrieval has been subject of intense research during the last decades. However, the space-borne radar sensors available so far provided single configuration observations where the influence of surface roughness frequently caused the solution of the backscattering process to be ill-posed. The ENVISAT/ASAR sensor offers new perspectives since the alternating pol...

The cosmic-ray method for measuring soil moisture, used in the Cosmic-Ray Soil Moisture Observing System (COSMOS), relies on the exceptional ability of hydrogen to moderate fast neutrons. Sources of hydrogen near the ground, other than soil moisture, affect the neutron measurement and therefore must be quantified. This study investigates the effect of atmospheric water vapor on the cosmic-ray p...

A long term data acquisition effort of profile soil moisture is currently underway at 13 automatic weather stations located in southwestern France. In this study, the soil moisture measured in-situ at 5 cm is used to evaluate the normalised surface soil moisture (SSM) estimates derived from coarse-resolution (25 km) active microwave data of the ASCAT 5 scatterometer instrument (onboard METOP), ...

[1] The goal of this study is to understand the interaction between belowground and aboveground ecohydrologic dynamics as facilitated by hydraulic redistribution. We analyze the partitioning of moisture and energy between tall and understory vegetation, and soil evaporation. Both the competitive and facilitative dependencies are examined using a shared resource model where the soil serves as a ...

This paper constitutes a digest and critique of the currently available information pertaining to the influence of live fuel or foliar moisture content (FMC) on the spread rate of crown fires in conifer forests and shrublands. We review and discuss the findings from laboratory experiments and field-based fire behaviour studies. Laboratory experimentation with single needles or leaves and small ...

Vertical soil moisture profiles based on the principle of maximum entropy (POME) were validated using field and model data and applied to guide an irrigation cycle over a maize field in north central Alabama (USA). The results demonstrate that a simple two-constraint entropy model under the assumption of a uniform initial soil moisture distribution can simulate most soil moisture profiles that ...

An approach is proposed to estimate soil moisture and to monitor its change from AMSR-E 6.9 GHz passive microwave data acquired over a large northern basin. The lack of in situ direct measurements is a major issue to be resolved to reach the aim of this work. Therefore, “external” ancillary data were used as a surrogate for available measurements. The methodology is based on the inversion of a ...

This study attempts to understand interactions between midlatitude convective systems and their environments through a heat and moisture budget analysis using the sounding data collected from the Midlatitude Continental Convective Clouds Experiment (MC3E) in central Oklahoma. Distinct large-scale structures and diabatic heating and drying profiles are presented for cases of weaker and elevated ...

Field-based soil moisture measurements are cumbersome. Remote sensing techniques based on active or passive microwave data have limitations. This paper presents and validates a new method based on land surface energy balances using remotely sensed optical data ~including thermal infrared!, which allows field and landscape-scale mapping of soil moisture depth-averaged through the root zone of ex...