Soil moisture is one of the most important key physical parameters in hydrological and environmental processes. During the past decade, remote sensing measurements have been widely used to provide mean surface soil moisture on a large spatial scale because conventional ground based measurements are not always available and require more time and cost. However, very few studies have been conducte...

Active microwave remote sensing observations hold the potential for efficient and reliable mapping of spatial soil moisture distributions. However, soil moisture retrievals from microwave remote sensing techniques are typically complex because of the inherent difficulty in characterizing the interactions among land surface parameters that contribute to the retrieval process. Therefore adequate ...

This paper examines the role of soil moisture in quantifying drought through the development of a drought index using observed and modeled soil moisture. In Nebraska, rainfall is received primarily during the crop-growing season and the supply of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico determines if the impending crop year is either normal or anomalous and any deficit of rain leads to a lack of soil m...

Moisture is one essential condition for seed germination, and poor germination is very costly to growers. There is, nevertheless, little experimental evidence concerning the effects of different percentages of available moisture (5) on germination; more study of the subject is essential. Since most vegetable seeds are planted at shallow depths, there may be rapid fluctuations of soil moisture a...

Root zone soil moisture is a key variable in many land surface hydrology models. Often, however, there is a mismatch in the spatial scales at which models simulate soil moisture and at which soil moisture is observed. This complicates model validation. The increased availability of detailed datasets on space-time variability of root-zone soil moisture allows for a posteriori analysis of the unc...

A METHOD FOR OBTAINING A CONTINUOUS MEASUREMENT OF SOIL MOISTURE UNDER FIELD CONDITIONS A has been devised for making in situ under field conditions a continuous measurement of soil moisture. It consists of imbedding in the soil a standardized block of CaSO4 (plaster of paris). The moisture content of this material varies directly with that of the soil. Since the dielectric constant of plaster ...

Reliable estimation of hydrological soil moisture state is of critical importance in operational hydrology to improve the flood prediction and hydrological cycle description. Although there have been a number of soil moisture products, they cannot be directly used in hydrological modelling. This paper attempts for the first time to build a soil moisture product directly applicable to hydrology ...

The potential of coupling soil moisture and a Universal Soil Loss Equation-based (USLE-based) model for event soil loss estimation at plot scale is carefully investigated at the Masse area, in central Italy. The derived model, named Soil Moisture for Erosion (SM4E), is applied by considering the unavailability of in situ soil moisture measurements, by using the data predicted by a soil water ba...

Three independent surface soil moisture datasets for the period 1979–87 are compared: 1) global retrievals from the Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR), 2) global soil moisture derived from observed meteorological forcing using the NASA Catchment Land Surface Model, and 3) ground-based measurements in Eurasia and North America from the Global Soil Moisture Data Bank. Time-average ...

Interactions between soil moisture and the atmosphere are driven by the partitioning of sensible and latent heating, through which soil moisture has been connected to atmospheric modifications that could potentially lead to the initiation of convective precipitation. The majority of previous studies linking the land surface to subsequent precipitation have used atmospheric reanalysis or model d...