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....

A good knowledge of the quality of the satellite soil moisture products is of great importance for their application and improvement. This paper examines the performance of eight satellite-based soil moisture products, including the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) passive Level 3 (L3), the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) Centre Aval de Traitement des Données SMOS (CATDS) L3, the Jap...

Robust models for predicting soil salinity that use visible and near-infrared (vis-NIR) reflectance spectroscopy are needed to better quantify soil salinity in agricultural fields. Currently available models are not sufficiently robust for variable soil moisture contents. Thus, we used external parameter orthogonalization (EPO), which effectively projects spectra onto the subspace orthogonal to...

Large-scale simulation of the soil-derived dust emission in semi-arid regions needs to account for the in ̄uence of the soil moisture on the wind erosion threshold. Soil water retention consists of molecular adsorption on the soil grain surface and capillary forces between the grain. Interparticle capillary forces (characterized by the moisture tension) are the main factor responsible for the in...

A long term data acquisition effort of profile soil moisture is under way in southwestern France at 13 automated weather stations. This ground network was developed in order to validate remote sensing and model soil moisture estimates. In this paper, both those in situ observations and a synthetic data set covering continental France are used to test a simple method to retrieve root zone soil m...

Most meteorological soil moisture budgets do not account for soil moisture stress changes in the drying cycle or for changes in ground cover or expanding root system. A simple modulated technique is described which considers these factors. Soil moisture stress determined by this technique has a significantly higher correlation with wheat yield than does moisture stress determined by R common me...

The effect of soil moisture on penetration, development, and reproduction of Heterodera cajani on pigeonpea (cv. ICPL 87) was investigated in growth chambers held at 20 and 25 C, and in a greenhouse where temperature fluctuated between 25 and 32 C. Averaged across temperatures, the percentage of juveniles that penetrated roots was 34.3, 31.8, 8.8, and 3.7% at 24, 32, 16, and 40% soil moisture l...