The potential of coupling soil moisture and a Universal Soil Loss Equation-based (USLE-based) model for event soil loss estimation at plot scale is carefully investigated at the Masse area, in central Italy. The derived model, named Soil Moisture for Erosion (SM4E), is applied by considering the unavailability of in situ soil moisture measurements, by using the data predicted by a soil water ba...

[1] The Kalman filter data assimilation technique is applied to a distributed threedimensional soil moisture model for retrieval of the soil moisture profile in a 6 ha catchment using near-surface soil moisture measurements. A simplified Kalman filter covariance forecasting methodology is developed based on forecasting of the state correlations and imposed state variances. This covariance forec...

The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of soil moisture condition and irrigation regime on the bioelectric potential of crops with different growth stages. The bioelectric potential of broccoli (Brassica oleracea var. italica) plants at the initial and mid-growth stages was measured under different soil moisture conditions and irrigation regimes using pot experiments. The result...

Soil moisture retrieval from SAR images using semi-empirical or physically-based backscatter models requires surface roughness parameters, generally obtained by means of in situ measurements. However, measured roughness parameters often result in inaccurate soil moisture contents. Furthermore, when these retrieved soil moisture contents need to be used in data assimilation schemes, it is import...

This paper examines the potential of scatterometer data from ERS satellites for improving hydrological simulations in both gauged and ungauged catchments. We compare the soil moisture dynamics simulated by a semidistributed hydrologic model in 320 Austrian catchments with the soil moisture dynamics inferred from the satellite data. The most apparent differences occur in the Alpine areas. Assimi...

[1] Characterization of the space-time variability of soil moisture is important for land surface and climate studies. Here we develop an analytical model to investigate how, at the dry-end of the soil moisture range, the main characteristics of the soil moisture field (spatial mean and variability, steady state distribution) depend on the intermittent character of low intensity rain storms. Ou...

A number of automated techniques for point measurement of soil moisture content have been developed to an operational level over the past few decades. While each of those techniques have been individually evaluated by the thermogravimetric (oven drying and weighing) method, typically under laboratory conditions, there have been few studies which have made a direct comparison between the various...

In situ soil moisture measurements are invaluable for calibrating and validating land surface models and satellite-based soil moisture retrievals. On a worldwide basis the number of meteorological networks measuring soil moisture is still limited and their data lack standardization of technique and protocol. In response to this, the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN) was initiated to se...

Soil moisture is an important control over atmospheric evolution, since it controls the partition of incoming radiation into latent and sensible heating. To accurately model these land surface fluxes, atmospheric models must ultimately have accurate soil moisture fields. Yet soil moisture is typically initialised indirectly in Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models, frequently resulting in u...

Field measurement of soil moisture is undertaken traditionally using point based measurement techniques such as neutron probes or time domain reflectrometry (TDR). Recently, a new technique has been developed that can be used to derive soil moisture at larger spatial scales by measuring neutrons that are generated by cosmic rays within the air and soil, and emitted back into the atmosphere. A ...