An increasing interest in bioremediation of hydrocarbon polluted sites raises the question of the influence of seasonal and diurnal changes on soil-water temperature on biodegradation of BTEX, a widespread group of (sub)-surface contaminants. Therefore, we investigated the impact of a wide range of varying soil-water temperature on biodegradation of toluene under aerobic conditions. To see the ...

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, developed by the European Space Agency (ESA), will be launched in the second half of 2009. It will be the first L-band (~1.4 GHz) passive microwave satellite specifically designed for global soil moisture observations, with an expected accuracy for the retrieved soil moisture of ~0.04 m/m. While passive microwave observations have been widely...

Numerical simulations are conducted using the Coupled Ocean/Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System (COAMPS) to investigate the impact of land–vegetation processes on the prediction of mesoscale convection observed on 24–25 May 2002 during the International H2O Project (IHOP_2002). The control COAMPS configuration uses the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model version of the Noah land sur...

The purpose of this study is to determine the temperature influence on the soil bulk dielectric permittivity, ε b, calculated from the measurement of the electromagnetic wave velocity of propagation along the parallel waveguide in a TDR probe, i.e. a probe working in Time Domain Reflectometry technique. The experimental evidence shows that the existing models do not completely describe the temp...

[1] Temperature changes at the Earth surface propagate into the subsurface and leave a thermal signature in the underlying soil and rock. Inversions of subsurface temperature measurements yield reconstructions of ground surface temperature (GST) histories that provide estimates of climatic changes. A question remaining in the interpretation of reconstructed GST histories is the extent to which ...

[1] It is proposed, on the basis of an argument of thermodynamic equilibrium, that land-atmosphere interactive processes lead to thermal and hydrologic states of the land surface that maximize evaporation in a given meteorological environment. The extremum principle leads to general equations linking surface energy fluxes to surface temperature and soil moisture. The hypothesis of maximum evapo...

Proper characterizations of background soil CO2 respiration rates are critical for interpreting CO2 leakage monitoring results at geologic sequestration sites. In this paper a method is developed for determining temperature-dependent critical values of soil CO2 flux for preliminary leak detection inference. The method is illustrated using surface CO2 flux measurements obtained from the AmeriFlu...

Soil and crop management practices can influence CO2 emission from crop and grasslands and therefore on global warming. We examined the effects of two irrigation systems (irrigated vs. non-irrigated) and six management practices [no-till malt barley (Hordeum vulgaris L.) with 67 or 134 kg N ha (NTBFN), notill malt-barley with 0 kg N ha (NTBON), conventional-till malt barley with 67 or 134 kg N ...

Decreasing temperature and increasing precipitation along altitude gradients are typical mountain climate in subtropical China. In such a climate regime, identifying the patterns of the C stable isotope composition (δ(13)C) in plants and soils and their relations to the context of climate change is essential. In this study, the patterns of δ(13)C variation were investigated for tree leaves, lit...