Soil moisture plays a key role in most environmental processes, as evaporation and transpiration are heavily dependent on soil moisture variability. While it is one of the few important hydrological variables that can be directly observed, the high spatial and temporal variability makes it difficult to measure globally or even regionally. Reliance is therefore placed on land surface models to p...

Knowledge of soil moisture content in the root zone is important throughout a wide range of environmental applications, yet adequate monitoring or modelling of this parameter, particularly at larger spatial scales, is difficult due to its high spatial and temporal variability. To overcome the land surface model limits on soil moisture estimation accuracy, point measurement spatial coverage limi...

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...

Surface soil moisture is a key variable used to describe water and energy exchanges at the land surface/atmosphere interface. Passive microwave remotely sensed data have great potential for providing estimates of soil moisture with good temporal repetition on a daily basis and on a regional scale (f 10 km). However, the effects of vegetation cover, soil temperature, snow cover, topography, and ...

The purpose of this study is to test the ability of the Land Surface Model SECHIBA to simulate water budget and particularly soil moisture at two different scales: regional and local. The model is forced by NLDAS data set at 1/8th degree resolution over the 1997–1999 period. SECHIBA gives satisfying results in terms of evapotranspiration and runoff over the US compared with four other land surf...

Soil moisture is a key variable that controls the exchange of water and energy fluxes between the land surface and the atmosphere. However, the temporal evolution of soil moisture is neither easy to measure nor monitor at large scales because of its high spatial variability. This is mainly a result of the local variation in soil properties and vegetation cover. Thus, land surface models are nor...

Soil moisture is among the key environmental variables controlling evaporation, infiltration and runoff. However, the temporal evolution of soil moisture is not easy to measure or monitor at large scales due to its spatial variability, which is largely driven by local variation in soil properties and vegetation cover. Consequently, soil moisture estimates using land surface models are typically...