Soil moisture is an important environmental variable in regulating energy fluxes and water infiltration near the soil surface. This makes it a significant parameter in meteorological and climate modelling applications. While ground measurement of soil moisture at a large spatial scale is cumbersome and time-consuming, remote sensing offers the advantage of frequent observations in time and spac...

Land surface models (LSM) are widely used as scientific and operational tools to simulate mass and energy fluxes within the soil vegetation atmosphere continuum for numerous applications in meteorology, hydrology or for geobiochemistry studies. A reliable parameterization of these models is important to improve the simulation skills. 5 Soil moisture is a key variable, linking the water and ener...

Water balance considerations at the soil surface lead to an equation that relates the autocorrelation of soil moisture in climate models to 1) seasonality in the statistics of the atmospheric forcing, 2) the variation of evaporation with soil moisture, 3) the variation of runoff with soil moisture, and 4) correlation between the atmospheric forcing and antecedent soil moisture, as perhaps induc...

This paper presents an evaluation of AMSR (Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer) soil moisture products, based on the comparison with three ground soil moisture networks. The selected ground sites are representative of various climatic, hydrologic and environmental conditions in temperate and semi-arid areas. They are located in the south-west of France, in the south-east of Australia and in ...

Soil moisture is an important factor for vegetation restoration and ecosystem sustainability in the Loess Plateau of China. The strong spatial heterogeneity of soil moisture is controlled by many environmental factors, including topography and land use. Moreover, the spatial patterns and soil hydrological processes depend on the scale of the site being investigated, which creates a challenge fo...

This research is a study on the relationship of irrigation water treatments and soil moisture distribution uniformity (DU). Soil moisture distribution was based on long-term data sets that were collected during wet and dry soil conditions (from permanent wilting point to field capacity) using a novel electromagnetic sensor-based platform moving inside subsurface horizontal access-tubes. The irr...

Correct knowledge of soil moisture is important for improving the prediction of coupled land surface atmosphere interactions. This is due to the control that soil moisture exerts on the latent and sensible heat flux transfer between the land surface and atmosphere. Because of this strong dependence on moisture availability, improved atmospheric prediction requires correct initialisation of soil...

Using 19 years of Chinese soil moisture data from 1981-1999, we evaluate soil moisture in three reanalysis outputs: ERA40, NCEP/NCAR reanalysis (R-1), and NCEP/DOE reanalysis 2 (R-2) over China. R-2 shows better interannual variability and seasonal patterns of soil moisture than R-1 as the result of incorporation of observed precipitation. ERA40 produces a better mean value of soil moisture for...

Soil moisture can significantly influence atmospheric evolution. However the soil moisture state predicted by land surface models, and subsequently used as the boundary condition in atmospheric models, is often unrealistic. New remote sensing technologies are able to observe surface soil moisture at the scales and coverage required by numerical weather prediction (NWP), and there is potential t...

[1] There is considerable evidence that future global climate change will increase temperature and alter precipitation regime. To better understand how these factors will influence soil water dynamics, it is imperative to use multifactorial experiments. A 1 year “pulse” experiment, with 4°C warming and a doubling in precipitation, was performed to evaluate the changes in soil moisture dynamics....