Soil moisture information is of critical importance to real-world applications such as agriculture, water resource management, flood, fire and landslide prediction, mobility, soil hydraulic parameter estimation etc. Many of these applications require soil moisture information at high resolution. While this may be estimated from land surface models, the predictions are often poor due to inadequa...

The objective of this work was to explain an apparent contradiction in the literature related to the relationship between mean and variance (or standard deviation) of soil moisture fields. Some studies found an increase in soil moisture variance with decreasing mean soil moisture, while others showed a decrease. The evidence of maximum variance in the mid-range of mean soil moisture was also re...

Lack of sufficient information on conservation tillage systems leads to the dominating use of conventional tillage practice in most parts of Iran. Testing other management practices may help in decision making regarding the types of tillage systems that reduce soil deterioration. A three- years field experiment was conducted to study the effects of conventional (CT), reduced (RT) and no-till (N...

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...

Because of its long-term persistence, accurate initialization of land surface soil moisture in fully coupled global climate models has the potential to greatly increase the accuracy of climatological and hydrological prediction. To improve the initialization of soil moisture in the NASA Seasonal-to-Interannual Prediction Project (NSIPP), a onedimensional Kalman filter has been developed to assi...

Knowledge about the spatio-temporal variability of soil moisture is essential to understand and predict processes in climate science and hydrology. A significant body of literature exists on the characterization of the spatial variability and the rank stability (also called temporal stability) of absolute soil moisture. Yet previous studies were generally based on short-term measurement campaig...

The results of GPS L-band (L1, = 19 cm) surface reflection measurements observed using multiple polarizations and receiving antenna gains are described. The measurements were performed using the 300-m tall ETL Boulder Atmospheric Observatory (BAO) tower during summer through fall of 2002. In this experiment the first seasonal measurements of bare soil moisture from a stationary location using b...