Ecologists are beginning to recognize the effect of heterogeneity on structure and function in arid and semiarid ecosystems. Additionally, the influences of temperature on ecosystems are widely documented, but landscape temperature patterns and relationships with vegetation are rarely reported in ecological studies. To better understand the importance of temperature patterns to the conservation...

Soil moisture is an important yet unobserved reservoir of the hydrologic cycle linked to the spatial and temporal variability of precipitation [1]. The brightness temperature of the land surface at microwave wavelengths is sensitive to soil moisture. Terrestrial brightness temperature also depends on the temperature of the soil and vegetation canopy as well as other canopy and soil properties [...

Thomas, Matthew, B.S., May 2017 Geosciences Using Thermal Infrared Imaging to Estimate Soil Hydraulic Parameters: A Novel Approach Faculty Mentor: W. Payton Gardner, Marco Maneta In this study, skin temperature measured with a thermal infrared (TIR) camera was used to estimate soil hydraulic parameters. These physical properties that control how soils transport and retain water are notoriously ...

Recent fire activity throughout Alaska has increased the need to understand postfire impacts on soils and permafrost vulnerability. Our study utilized data and modeling from a permafrost and ecosystem gradient to develop a mechanistic understanding of the shortand long-term impacts of tundra and boreal forest fires on soil thermal dynamics. Fires influenced a variety of factors that altered the...

[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...

Field experiments were conducted to validate a one-dimensional numerical Simple Soil Plant Atmospheric Transfer (SiSPAT) model that simulates heat and water transfer through the root zone of a surface irrigated, cropped sandy soil. The model accounts for the dominant processes involved in water and heat transfer in a cropped soil. Model validation used field experimental data from 2004 and sugg...

Thermal sensors hold much promise for the detection of non-metallic landmines. However, the prediction of their thermal signatures depends on a large number of factors. In this paper, an analytical solution for temperature propagation through homogeneous and layered soils is presented to predict surface temperatures as a function of soil heat flux amplitude, soil texture, soil water content, an...

Row structure causes the anisotropy of microwave brightness temperature (TB) of soil surface, and it also can affect soil moisture retrieval accuracy when its influence is ignored in the inversion model. To study the effect of typical row structure on the retrieved soil moisture and evaluate if there is a need to introduce this effect into the inversion model, two ground-based experiments were ...