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 ...

Soil moisture governs the surface fluxes of mass and energy and is a major influence on floods and drought. Existing techniques measure soil moisture either at a point or over a large area many kilometers across. To bridge these two scales we used the cosmic-ray rover, an instrument similar to the recently developed COSMOS probe, but bigger and mobile. This paper explores the challenges and opp...

Soil moisture is an important factor in the global hydrologic cycle, but existing reconstructions of historic soil moisture are limited. We used tree-ring chronologies to reconstruct annual soil moisture in the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB). Gridded soil moisture data were spatially regionalized using principal components analysis and k-nearest neighbor techniques. We correlated moisture se...

In the present work, we present a new formulation for the estimation of the soil moisture in the root zone based on the measured value of soil moisture at the surface. The method sheds lights on the relationship between surface and root zone soil moisture. It derives from a simplified form of the soil water balance equation and provides a closed form of the relationship between the root zone an...

Soil moisture is one of the most important variables that influences the soil-vegetation-atmosphere fluxes. This is particularly true over the Sahelian region, soil moisture has an important feedback on precipitation. It is particularly difficult to access to soil moisture values because its high temporal and spatial variability. Different approaches exist, but microwave remote sensing is the m...

The upcoming deployment of satellite-based microwave sensors designed specifically to retrieve surface soil moisture represents an important milestone in efforts to develop hydrologic applications for remote sensing observations. However, typical measurement depths of microwave-based soil moisture retrievals are generally considered too shallow (top 2–5 cm of the soil column) for many important...

[1] Soil moisture trends, particularly during the growing season, are an important possible consequence of global warming. Climate model simulations of future soil moisture changes should be made with models that can produce reliable simulations of soil moisture for past climate changes. In this paper, we compare soil moisture simulations from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth As...

The variance budget of land surface hydrological quantities is analyzed in the second Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP2) simulation made with the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis (CCCma) third-generation general circulation model (AGCM3). The land surface parameterization in this model is the comparatively sophisticated Canadian Land Surface Scheme (CLASS). Seco...

Soil moisture gradients along hillslopes in humid watersheds, although indicated by vegetation gradients and by studies using models, have been difficult to confirm empirically. While soil properties and topographic features are the two general physiographic factors controlling soil moisture on hillslopes, studies have shown conflicting results regarding which factor is more important. The rela...

Old-growth ponderosa pine (Pinusponderosa) forests are uncommon in the Southwest, and only one old growth forest (the Gus Pearson Natural Area [GPNA]) has been researched in the ponderosa pine belt sur rounding the city of Flagstaff in northern Arizona. The purpose of this study was to measure soil characteris tics, current and pre-Euro-American settlement (1885) tree structure, and understory ...