Airborne remote sensing provides a viable option for high resolution mapping of nearsurface soil moisture that allows larger areas to be covered in greater spatial and temporal detail than has hereto been possible from traditional ground based techniques. However, the current retrieval algorithms require information on near-surface soil temperature and vegetation water content in order to estim...

     Temperature is considered as the basic element of climate and also the environmental limiting factor in LutDesert. In this research, in order to identify the temperature of Lut Desert located in east of central Iran, using remote sensing data, six series of MODIS sensor images related to June 24th & December 23rd 2002, and also January 22nd, March 22nd, June 22nd & September 24th 2003 were...

ABSTRACT Races 0 (Foc-0) and 5 (Foc-5) of Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. ciceris differ in virulence and induce yellowing or wilting syndrome, respectively, in chickpea. We modeled the combined effects of soil temperature and inoculum density of Foc-0 and Foc-5 on disease developed in chickpea cvs. P-2245 and PV-61 differing in susceptibility to those races, using quantitative nonlinear models. Dise...

A spectral window in the thermal infrared permits observations of surface temperature by satellite radiometry. The Heat Capacity Mapping Mission (HCMM) acquired 10-12/tm data at times of day favorable for estimation of surface thermal properties and the surface energy budget. Two variables, surface wetness, which controls evaporation and hence mean surface temperature, and thermal inertia, whic...

The passive infrared (IR) imaging signature of buried mines under three different soil surface conditions is investigated in this work. The three-dimensional (3-D) nature of the mine, the site, and the temporal attributes of surrounding climate and exposed radiation are accounted for large and moderate-scale clutter surfaces as well as a smooth surface. The effect of the shortand long-wavelengt...

The radar backscattering coefficient of three types of soil surfaces at observation angles (10°60°) have been calculated using integral equation model (IEM) for different values of root mean square (RMS) roughness heights and correlation lengths. The surfaces are represented by isotropic autocorrelation functions (exponential, 1.5 power and Gaussian). The dielectric constant (ε) of the soil, an...

Methane (CH4 ) emissions from the northern high-latitude region represent potentially significant biogeochemical feedbacks to the climate system. We compiled a database of growing-season CH4 emissions from terrestrial ecosystems located across permafrost zones, including 303 sites described in 65 studies. Data on environmental and physical variables, including permafrost conditions, were used t...

Because land surface emissivity ( ) has not been reliably measured, global climate model (GCM) land surface schemes conventionally set this parameter as simply constant, for example, 1 as in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) model, and 0.96 for bare soil as in the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Commun...

A description of the coupling of Integrated Biosphere Simulator (IBIS) to Regional Climate Model version 3 (RegCM3) is presented. IBIS introduces several key advantages to RegCM3, most notably vegetation dynamics, the coexistence of multiple plant functional types in the same grid cell, more sophisticated plant phenology, plant competition, explicit modeling of soil/plant biogeochemistry, and a...

In this paper we develop a method to estimate land-surface water content in amostly forest-dominated (humid) and topographically-varied region of eastern Canada. Theapproach is centered on a temperature-vegetation wetness index (TVWI) that uses standard 8-day MODIS-based image composites of land surface temperature (TS) and surface reflectanceas primary input. In an attempt to improve estimates...