Leaf water potential, leaf relative water content, and relative transpiration of barley were determined daily under greenhouse conditions at 3 growth stages: tillering to boot, boot to heading, and heading to maturity. The leaf moisture characteristic curve (relative water content versus leaf water potential) was the same for leaves of the same age growing in the same environment for the first ...

Upon an increase of moisture, unsaturated soil may collapse or swell, depending on the loading state and history. This important characteristic must be realistically reproduced by a constitutive model aimed for practical applications. In addition to collapse/swelling, other essential features, such as deformation and failure following arbitrary shearing paths, must also be realistically reprodu...

A solid state fermentation method was used to utilize wheat straw as substrates for citric acid production by using Aspergillus niger ATCC 9142. The Plackett Burman design (PBD) of experiments was used to test the relative importance of the variables affecting production such as moisture content, age of spore, inoculum size, initial pH of substrate, methanol conce...

Conservation agriculture is often presented as being ‘climate smart’ due to anticipated increases in soil moisture. The extent of enhanced water availability in farmers’ fields is, however, poorly documented. This paper presents five data sets describing soil moisture in fields of small-scale conservation and conventional farmers in the Agro-ecological Zone IIa, Zambia. The data include (1) soi...

M o is tu re tr a n s fe r H e a t tr a n s fe r April 2013 Glass, Samuel V. 2013. Hygrothermal analysis of wood-frame wall assemblies in a mixed-humid climate. The use of trade or firm names in this publication is for reader information and does not imply endorsement by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) of any product or service. The USDA prohibits discrimination in all its pr...

BACKGROUND Drying of terebinth fruit was conducted to provide microbiological stability, reduce product deterioration due to chemical reactions, facilitate storage and lower transportation costs. Because terebinth fruit is susceptible to heat, the selection of a suitable drying technology is a challenging task. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are used as a nonlinear mapping structures for mod...

The Chinese HY-2, a satellite designed for ocean dynamic environment monitoring, was launched on August 16, 2011. The onboard scanning microwave radiometer (RM) is primarily designed for sea surface temperature and wind speed mapping. However, our objective of this investigation is to exploit the large amount of land observations of RM and to extend the mission scope to the retrieval of surface...