Remotely sensed soil moisture products derived from the Advanced SCATterometer (ASCAT) and from the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) radiometer are analyzed and compared. The comparison has been carried out within the framework of an activity aiming at validating the EUMETSAT Hydrology Satellite Application Facility (H-SAF) soil moisture products derived from ASCAT over Europe and North ...

Bags of Pinus strobus wood chips with moisture contents of 38, 92, 164, and 217% (oven dry weight) were inoculated with Bursaphelenchus xylophilus and incubated at 30 C in order to determine the effect of wood moisture on nematode population development. Nematodes were extracted after 2, 4, 8, and 12 weeks. Population levels were greatest in wood chips with a moisture content of 38% and decreas...

Knowledge about the spatio-temporal variability of soil moisture is essential to understand and predict processes in climate science and hydrology. A significant body of literature exists on the characterization of the spatial variability and the rank stability (also called temporal stability) of absolute soil moisture. Yet previous studies were generally based on short-term measurement campaig...

Current models for seasonal climate prediction are limited due to poor initialization of the land surface soil moisture states. Passive microwave remote sensing provides quantitative information on soil moisture in a thin near-surface soil layer at large scale. This information can be integrated with a land surface process model through data assimilation to give better prediction of the near su...

Three river basins, i.e., the Yangtze river, the Mississippi river and the Loire river, were presented as case studies to explore the association among atmospheric circulations, moisture exports and extreme precipitations in the mid-latitudes. The major moisture source regions in the tropics for the three river basins are first identified using the Tropical Moisture Exports (TMEs) dataset. The ...

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...

The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite makes coincident global measurements of soil moisture using an L-band radar instrument and an L-band radiometer. It is crucial to evaluate the errors in the newest L-band SMAP satellite-derived soil moisture products, before they are routinely used in scientific research and applications. This study represents the first evaluation of the SMAP ra...

In this study, long-term (1961–2011) variations in the moisture budget and drought/flood events in six subregions of China are analyzed. Water vapor is mainly transported zonally during winter, while meridional transport is much stronger during summer. During winter, both the input moisture from the western boundary and the output moisture from the eastern boundary are slightly weakened; thus, ...

[1] We compare European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts 15-year reanalysis (ERA-15) moisture over the tropical oceans with satellite observations and the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) National Center for Atmospheric Research 40-year reanalysis. When systematic differences in moisture between the observational and reanalysis data sets are removed, the NCEP d...

In this paper the influence of the moisture content on the flow characteristics of blast furnace dust is investigated. The flowability of granular material is essential for the design and operation of dust separators, transport equipment and storage silos. Two blast furnace dust samples from different blast furnaces were investigated. The moisture content was adapted for measurement with the sh...