The main aim of this paper is to accentuate the sensitivity of correlation length ‘l’ as an important roughness parameter in quantifying the moisture content of bare soil surfaces with specular scattering. For this purpose, an indigenously designed bistatic scatterometer has been used to generate co-polarized specular data at X-band (10 GHz) with incidence angle varied from 30◦–70◦ in steps of ...

Image data from L-band airborne radiometer measurements over conifer forest stands in southern Virginia USA have shown a strong sensitivity to biomass and a weaker sensitivity to soil moisture. The data, was obtained by the horizontally polarized synthetic aperture radiometer, ESTAR, deployed aboard a NASA P3 aircraft. The data was acquired in July, August and November of 1999. The imaged regio...

Since the decomposition rate of soil organic carbon (SOC) varies as a function of environmental conditions, global climate change is expected to alter SOC decomposition dynamics, and the resulting changes in the amount of CO2 emitted from soils will feedback onto the rate at which climate change occurs. While this soil feedback is expected to be significant because the amount of SOC is substant...

An approach is proposed to estimate soil moisture and to monitor its change from AMSR-E 6.9 GHz passive microwave data acquired over a large northern basin. The lack of in situ direct measurements is a major issue to be resolved to reach the aim of this work. Therefore, “external” ancillary data were used as a surrogate for available measurements. The methodology is based on the inversion of a ...

This study attempts to understand interactions between midlatitude convective systems and their environments through a heat and moisture budget analysis using the sounding data collected from the Midlatitude Continental Convective Clouds Experiment (MC3E) in central Oklahoma. Distinct large-scale structures and diabatic heating and drying profiles are presented for cases of weaker and elevated ...

Microwave radiometry at low frequencies (L-band: 1.4 GHz, 21 cm) is an established technique for estimating surface soil moisture and sea surface salinity with a suitable sensitivity. However, from space, large antennas (several meters) are required to achieve an adequate spatial resolution at L-band. So as to reduce the problem of putting into orbit a large filled antenna, the possibility of u...

Different heat-moisture levels were applied to native starches from different cultivars of sweet potatoes available in Sri Lanka (Wariyapola red, Wariyapola white, Pallepola variety, Malaysian variety and CARI 273) to study the digestibility level. Samples were treated with 20, 25, and 30% moisture at 85°C and 120°C for 6 h and in vitro starch digestibility was tested with porcine pancreatin en...

Satellite-derived vegetation indices extracted over locations representative of midwestern U.S. cropland and forest for the period 1990–94 are analyzed to determine the sensitivity of the indices to neutron probe soil moisture measurements of the Illinois Climate Network (ICN). The deseasoned (i.e., departures from multiyear mean annual cycle) soil moisture measurements are shown to be weakly c...