Fresh market tomato production is a $5 billion a year industry. Tomatoes are a warm season vegetable crop with large acreages grown in warm climates such as Florida and California. Tomatoes are also grown in numerous northern states earning premium prices for early production in cooler climates. Tomato production often employs plasticulture, such as the use of plastic mulches, for earliness and...

Abstract Geosynthetic clay liners are widely used as hydraulic barrier due to their low conductivity but bentonite in the loses its effectiveness significant thermal fluxes by both diurnal and seasonal heating cooling cycles. Modified sodium carboxy methyl cellulose-based (HYPER clay) has shown better performance situations. A possible reason for this improved of HYPER based geosynthetic liner ...

An improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) was proposed and the intelligent algorithms such as IPSO, genetic algorithm (GA), and simulated annealing algorithm (SA) were introduced to determine parameters of Van Genuchten (VG) model for soil water retention curve (SWRC) of four typical agricultural soil textures (clay, clay loam, silt loam and sand loam) in China. For comparison, the SWRC in...

The moisture retention and compression characteristics of municipal solid waste under self-weight are likened to those of an unsaturated soil. By assuming that the solid organic fraction in waste retains a relatively immobile micropore moisture and that deformation at low confining stress occurs at the expense of a relatively large macropore system, an insight into the variation of density and ...

Some essential features of the terrestrial hydrologic cycle and ecosystem response are singled out by confronting empirical observations of the soil water balance of different ecosystems with the results of a stochastic model of soil moisture dynamics. The simplified framework analytically describes how hydroclimatic variability (especially the frequency and amount of rainfall events) concurs w...

The objective of this work was to explain an apparent contradiction in the literature related to the relationship between mean and variance (or standard deviation) of soil moisture fields. Some studies found an increase in soil moisture variance with decreasing mean soil moisture, while others showed a decrease. The evidence of maximum variance in the mid-range of mean soil moisture was also re...