to design subsurface drainage systems, it is necessary to determine the saturated hydraulic conductivity of the soil. one of the most common methods for field measurement of this parameter is the shallow well pump-in test method. another method which has recently been introduced for the above measurement is the guelph permeameter method. both methods are used to measure the soil saturated hydra...

Soil moisture is an important parameter that drives agriculture, climate and hydrological systems. In addition, retrieval of soil moisture is important in the analysis as well as its influence on these systems. Radar imagery is best suited for this retrieval due to its all-weather capability and independence from solar irradiation. Soil moisture retrieval was done for the Malinda Wetland, Tanza...

Soft soil contact models developed for planetary exploration rovers play an important role in the study of rover mobility. Nowadays, most of the existing contact models are based on Bekker theory which requires the evaluation of several soil parameters usually measured via bevameter tests. However, substantial differences existing between the plate-soil contact scenario and the wheel-soil conta...

Here we explore the appropriateness of various parameter values for the Bowers et al. model [Risk Anal 14:183-189, 1994] in the context of predicting the influence of site-related exposure to lead in soil on the blood lead (PbB) levels of women of childbearing age. We outline the parameters prescribed by Bowers et al. as well as those prescribed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S....

[1] To overcome the difficulties in determining the optimal parameters needed for a radiative transfer model (RTM), which acts as the observational operator in a land data assimilation system, we have designed a dual-pass assimilation (DP-En4DVar) framework to optimize the model state (volumetric soil moisture content) and model parameters simultaneously using the gridded Advanced Microwave Sca...

A dielectric mixing model has been developed to calculate the complex permittivity of wet soils at 5.65 GHz (C-band) and 9.5 GHz (X-band) microwave frequencies. The model considers the complex permittivity of dry soil as initial parameter. The complex permittivity of wet soil has been estimated in terms of the complex permittivity of dry soil, the complex permittivity of water at a given microw...

Data assimilation (DA) methods are commonly used for finding a compromise between imperfect observations and uncertain model predictions. The estimation of model states and parameters has been widely recognized, but the convergence of estimated parameters has not been thoroughly investigated. The distribution of model state and parameter values is closely linked to convergence, which in turn im...

In the course of Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission calibration and validation activities, a ground based L-band radiometer ELBARA II was situated at the test site Puch in Southern Germany in the Upper Danube Catchment. The experiment is described and the different data sets acquired are presented. The L-band microwave emission of the biosphere (L-MEB) model that is also used in th...

Soil cation exchange capacity (CEC) is a parameter that represents soil fertility. Being difficult to measure, pedotransfer functions (PTFs) can be routinely applied for prediction of CEC by soil physicochemical properties that can be easily measured. This study developed the support vector regression (SVR) combined with genetic algorithm (GA) together with the adaptive network-based fuzzy infe...