The Penman-Monteith equation is useful for computing evaporation rates of uniform surfaces, such as dense vegetation or bare soil. This equation becomes less useful for evaluation of evaporation rates at the regional scale, where surfaces are generally characterized by a patchy combination of vegetation and soil. This is particularly true in the arid and semi-arid regions of the world. The appr...

The purpose of this paper is the capacity of spectral reflectance, in the full optical domain 0.4 – 12.0 m, to retrieve the Soil Moisture Content (SMC) of bare soils. Indeed, the knowledge of surface soil moisture is a key point for many applications like trafficability after flood, ground – atmosphere exchanges and plant good health. Hyperspectral image acquisitions (narrow spectral bands and ...

T h e Hapke bidirectional reflectance model has been widely used for soil modeling, but gives significant errors when the soil scatters very strongly and anisotropically. In our new model, we decompose the radiation field into three components instead of two: single-scattering radiance, double-scattering radiance, and multiple-scattering radiance. The first two components can be exactly calcula...

The present review highlights the recent applications of mid-infrared spectroscopy and in particular of diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRIFT) and attenuated total reflectance (ATR) and processing methods (e.g., deconvolution, derivative and chemometrics) to rapidly provide valuable information on soil composition and organic geochemistry. Research has demonstrated that both DRIFT and ATR tec...

Four proximal soil sensors were tested at four smallholder farms in Embu County, Kenya: a portable X-ray fluorescence sensor (PXRF), a mobile phone application for soil color determination by photography, a dual-depth electromagnetic induction (EMI) sensor, and a LED-based soil optical reflectance sensor. Measurements were made at 32-43 locations at each site. Topsoil samples were analyzed for ...

We obtain valuable information on the angular and seasonal variability of surface reflectance using a hand-held spectrometer from a light aircraft. The data is used to test a procedure that allows us to estimate visible surface reflectance from the longer wavelength 2.1 _tm channel (mid-IR). Estimating or avoiding surface reflectance in the visible is a vital first step in most algorithms that ...

Estimation model between soil moisture content and the near infrared reflectance was established by the linear regression method and the models between soil total nitrogen content and the near infrared reflectance were also established by the BP neural network method and Support Vector Machine (SVM) method. Forty-eight soil samples were collected from China Agricultural University Experimental ...

Soil salinity undermines global agriculture by reducing crop yield and impairing soil quality. Irrigation management can help control salinity levels within the soil root-zone. To best manage water and soil resources, accurate regional-scale inventories of soil salinity are needed. The past decade has seen several successful applications of soil salinity remote sensing. Two salinity remote sens...

The objectives of this research were to: (i) develop hyperspectral narrow-band models to determine soil variables such as organic matter content (OM), sum of cations (SC = Ca + Mg + K), aluminum saturation (m%), cations saturation (V%), cations exchangeable capacity (CEC), silt, sand and clay content using visible-near infrared (Vis-NIR) diffuse reflectance spectra; (ii) compare the variations ...