Soil moisture gradients along hillslopes in humid watersheds, although indicated by vegetation gradients and by studies using models, have been difficult to confirm empirically. While soil properties and topographic features are the two general physiographic factors controlling soil moisture on hillslopes, studies have shown conflicting results regarding which factor is more important. The rela...

Subject matter experts systematically reviewed evidence on the effectiveness of housing interventions that affect health outcomes, primarily asthma, associated with exposure to moisture, mold, and allergens. Three of the 11 interventions reviewed had sufficient evidence for implementation: multifaceted, in-home, tailored interventions for reducing asthma morbidity; integrated pest management to...

This dissertation describes efforts to overcome the challenges in designing in situ soil moisture observation network. The surface soil moisture data collected at two spatial scales in a working field in Iowa throughout the growing seasons in 2004 to 2008 were used to describe the spatio-temporal characteristics of soil moisture at field scale. The rank stability analysis was used to identify t...

During the last decade, great progress has been made by the scientific community in generating satellite-derived global surface soil moisture products, as a valuable source of information to be used in a variety of applications, such as hydrology, meteorology and climatic modeling. Through the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative (ESA CCI), the most complete and consistent global soi...

In high frequency signal packaging, the plastic dielectric material takes on an increasingly important role in the performance of the signal transmission. Variations within the plastic can occur as a result of a number of manufacturing and environmental processes. These variations can be sufficient to change the dielectric properties. The extent of change to the dielectric properties of polymer...

Evidence from Los Angeles County in California, USA suggests that the relationships between wildfire burn area and fuel age, temperature, precipitation, and fuel moisture are not linear. Instead, the relationships appear to have thresholds. The data seem to support the notion that fire risk is nearly constant provided various conditions are met: that fuel age and temperature exceed a given thre...

In this paper, we presented a theoretical result and then discussed possible applications of our result to SDR problems. In addition to providing insights into existing SDR methods when Y is univariate; our theorem also applies to multivariate responses, especially when the response takes the form of ðY ;W Þ, where Y is a continuous variable and W is categorical. r 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights...

Sufficient dimension reduction aims at finding transformations of predictor X without losing any regression information of Y versus X . If we are only interested in the information contained in the mean function or the kth moment function of Y given X , estimation of the central mean space or the central kth moment space becomes our focus. However, existing estimators for the central mean space...

The requirement of constant censoring parameter β in Koziol–Green (KG) model is too restrictive. When covariates are present, the conditional KG model (Veraverbekea and Cadarso-Suárez, 2000) which allows β to be dependent on the covariates is more realistic. In this paper, using sufficient dimension reduction methods, we provide a model-free diagnostic tool to test if β is a function of the cov...