dust is a common atmospheric phenomenon in iran especially in central arid regions.  this severely affects environment as well as resident’s health. among the results of this phenomenon are respiratory diseases, bash radiation, accelerated soil erosion, desertification and degradation of ecosystems. some dusts are originated from local desert conditions but adjacency to neighboring countries de...

With the ability to monitor soil moisture in time comes the opportunity to develop ways to incorporate these measurements into predictive models, without compromising or overriding the model physics. The importance of soil moisture to the growth of crops is well understood and because of this it is recognized as one of the more important parts of crop modeling programs. This research focused on...

[1] Soil temperature and moisture are important factors that control many ecosystem processes. However, interactions between soil thermal and hydrological processes are not adequately understood in cold regions, where the frozen soil, fire disturbance, and soil drainage play important roles in controlling interactions among these processes. These interactions were investigated with a new ecosys...

From infestation of lettuce with preinfective females to egg deposition, populations of Rotylenchulus reniformis from Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Lubbock and Weslaco, Texas; and Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, required 41, 13, 7, and 7 days at 15, 20, 25, and 34 C, respectively. No nematode infection occurred at 10 C with any R. reniformis population, and the population from Puerto Rico did not reproduce at...

Soil moisture influences and is influenced by water, climate, and ecosystem conditions, affecting associated ecosystem services in the landscape. This paper couples snow storage-melting dynamics with an analytical modeling approach to screening basin-scale, long-term soil moisture variability and change in a changing climate. This coupling enables assessment of both spatial differences and temp...

[1] Biological activity in arid grasslands is strongly dependent on moisture. We examined gas exchange of biological soil crusts (biocrusts), the underlying soil biotic community, and the belowground respiratory activity of C3 and C4 grasses over 2 years in southeast Utah, USA. We used soil surface CO2 flux and the amount and carbon isotope composition (dC) of soil CO2 as indicators of belowgro...

Reliable soil moisture measurement over large areas is much needed for both hydrologic modelling and remote sensing applications. For collecting such data, portable electronic sensors offer a practical alternative to gravimetric measurements. The conversion of the measured electrical output to soil moisture is nonetheless a non-trivial task as it depends on soil type and temperature. In this st...

Reliable soil moisture measurements over large areas are much needed for both hydrologic modelling and remote sensing applications. For collecting such data, portable electronic sensors offer a practical alternative to gravimetric measurements. The conversion of the measured electrical output to soil moisture is nonetheless a non trivial task as it depends on soil type and temperature. In this ...

Data assimilation (DA) methods are commonly used for finding a compromise between imperfect observations and uncertain model predictions. The estimation of model states and parameters has been widely recognized, but the convergence of estimated parameters has not been thoroughly investigated. The distribution of model state and parameter values is closely linked to convergence, which in turn im...

Knowledge of soil moisture dynamics in the unsaturated soil zone provides valuable information on the temporal and spatial variability of groundwater recharge. This is especially true for the Mediterranean region, where a substantial fraction of long-term groundwater recharge is expected to occur during high magnitude precipitation events of aboveaverage wet winters. To elucidate process unders...