The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, developed by the European Space Agency (ESA), will be launched in the second half of 2009. It will be the first L-band (~1.4 GHz) passive microwave satellite specifically designed for global soil moisture observations, with an expected accuracy for the retrieved soil moisture of ~0.04 m/m. While passive microwave observations have been widely...

the purpose of this research was to study and predict fuel consumption rate of tractor due to different aspect ratios of chisel plow blade and to determine a general relationship equation between aspect ratio ( ) and fuel consumption rate.  an itm-399 (81 kw) tractor and a mounted-type chisel plow with 9 shanks were used. the 5 and 10 cm width chisel blades were used. the experiments were condu...

the harvested walnut has a relatively high moisture content of 30% compared with the safe storage moisture content of 8%. one of the common means of reducing the moisture content is by drying. for design of drying and other aeration systems for agricultural products including walnuts, the relationship between the drop in pressure and airflow velocity must be known. an airflow resistance app...

Wireless underground sensor networks (WUSNs) consist of buried nodes, which are connected to subsurface underground sensors, and use electromagnetic (EM) waves for underground communications. WUSNs are capable of operating in environments where no other computer network has functioned before, and has the potential to provide real-time, robust, and energy efficient sensing, and communication in ...

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...

Fluctuations in soil moisture create drying-rewetting events affecting the activity of microorganisms. Microbial responses to drying-rewetting are mostly studied in soils that are air-dried before rewetting. Upon rewetting, two patterns of bacterial growth have been observed. In the Type 1 pattern, bacterial growth rates increase immediately in a linear fashion. In the Type 2 pattern, bacterial...

[1] The radar backscattering coefficient is mainly determined by surface soil moisture, vegetation and land surface roughness under a given configuration of the satellite sensor. It is observed that the temporal variations of the three variables are different, the variation of vegetation and roughness are at the longer temporal scales corresponding to climate and cultivation practices, while so...

seed loss at harvesting time is one of the factors reducing seed yield in at farms. this study was carried out within a research farm in karaj to evaluate and select a proper pinto bean line for mechanized harvesting at two moisture contents during harvesting and their effect on seed yield and yield loss among three lines of pinto bean. the experiment was split-plot based on randomized complete...

Shrubs and subshrubs can tolerate wider ranges of moisture stresses in both soil and air than other plant life forms, and thus represent greater nonlinearity and uncertainty in ecosystem physiology. The objectives of this paper are to model shrub/subshrub stomatal conductance by synthesizing the field leaf gas exchanges data of 24 species in China, in order to detect the differences between dec...