A novel methodology is introduced for quantifying the added value of remotely sensed soil moisture products for global land surface modeling applications. The approach is based on the assimilation of soil moisture retrievals into a simple surface water balance model driven by satellite-based precipitation products. Filter increments (i.e., discrete additions or subtractions of water suggested b...

Moisture-responsive materials are gaining greater interest for their potentially wide applications and the readily access to moisture. In this study, we show the fabrication of moisture-responsive, self-standing films using sustainable cellulose as starting material. Cellulose was modified by stearoyl moieties at first, leading to cellulose stearoyl esters (CSEs) with diverse degrees of substit...

Soil moisture is the key variable in the hydrological cycle. In the Volta Basin, West Africa, where rainfed agriculture forms the main source of income for the majority of the population; productivity relies on available soil moisture or “green water”. Progress will depend on good management of green water, and will be strongly based on monitoring results. Data scarcity in the Volta Basin empha...

The southeast, despite its abundant rainfall, suffers short-term summer droughts with detrimental effect on crop yield. No-till production systems provide added insurance against such conditions by improving infiltration, and conserving moisture in drought-prone soils. In three years of experiment near Watkinsville, GA, no-till cotton treatments maintained higher soil moisture content, more veg...

Recent studies [Bourgeau-Chavez, L.L., Kasischke, E.S., Riordan, K., Brunzell, S.M., Nolan, M., Hyer, E.J., Slawski, J.J., Medvecz, M., Walters, T., and Ames, S. (in press). Remote monitoring of spatial and temporal surface soil moisture in fire disturbed boreal forest ecosystems with ERS SAR imagery. Int. J. Rem. Sens.] demonstrated that ERS SAR imagery can be used to estimate surface soil moi...

Pea (Pisum sativum L.) mutant near-isogenic lines (RRrbrb, rrRbRb, rrrbrb) with lower starch but higher lipid contents, brought about by lesions in the starch biosynthetic pathway, had seed moisture sorption isotherms displaced below that of the wild type (RRRbRb). The negative logarithmic relationship between seed longevity and seed storage moisture content (%, f.wt basis), determined in herme...

Jiangsu is an important agricultural province in China. Winter wheat, as the second major grain crop in the province, is greatly affected by moisture variations. The objective of this study was to investigate whether there were significant trends in changes in the moisture conditions during wheat growing seasons over the past decades and how the wheat yields responded to different moisture leve...

The influence of soil moisture in thermal infrared emissivity is a known fact, but poorly studied in the past. An experiment for quantifying the dependence of emissivity on soil moisture has been designed. Six samples of superficial horizons of different Mediterranean soil types have been selected. Their emissivity has been measured at different soil water contents, using the twolid variant of ...

Monitoring of a passively-aerated plastic-wrapped mortality composting system designed for emergency disposal of diseased swine highlighted the importance of the physical characteristics of materials used to envelop the carcasses. Inadequate moisture was a problem when using envelope materials such as ground cornstalks or straw having low density and high air-filled porosity. High O2 concentrat...

This research examines the simultaneous retrieval of surface soil moisture and salt concentrations using hyperspectral reflectance data in an arid environment. We conducted laboratory and outdoor field experiments in which we examined three key soil variables: soil moisture, salt and texture (silty loam, clay and silty clay). The soil moisture content models for multiple textures (M_SMC models)...