While it is well known that soil moisture directly affects microbial activity and soil organic matter (SOM) decomposition, it is unclear if the presence of plants alters these effects through rhizosphere processes. We studied soil moisture effects on SOM decomposition with and without sunflower and soybean. Plants were grown in two different soil types with soil moisture contents of 45% and 85%...

In this paper, a soil moisture estimation model was developed to calculate the nationwide soil moisture fields using on site soil moisture observation, precipitation, surface temperature, MODIS NDVI and a data mining technique, Classification And Regression Tree (CART) algorithm and neural networks. The model was applied to the Yong-dam dam basin since the soil moisture observations of the Yong...

Soil moisture is a key variable in dryland ecosystems since it determines the occurrence and duration of vegetation water stress and affects the development of weather patterns including rainfall. However, the lack of ground observations of soil moisture and rainfall dynamics in many drylands has long been a major obstacle in understanding ecohydrological processes in these ecosystems. It is al...

Soil moisture products acquired from passive satellite missions have been widely applied in environmental processes. A primary challenge for the use of soil moisture products from passive sensors is their reliability. It is crucial to evaluate the reliability of those products before they can be routinely used at a global scale. In this paper, we evaluated the Soil Moisture Active/Passive (SMAP...

Reliable estimation of hydrological soil moisture state is of critical importance in operational hydrology to improve the flood prediction and hydrological cycle description. Although there have been a number of soil moisture products, they cannot be directly used in hydrological modelling. This paper attempts for the first time to build a soil moisture product directly applicable to hydrology ...

Soil moisture governs the surface fluxes of mass and energy and is a major influence on floods and drought. Existing techniques measure soil moisture either at a point or over a large area many kilometers across. To bridge these two scales we used the cosmic-ray rover, an instrument similar to the recently developed COSMOS probe, but bigger and mobile. This paper explores the challenges and opp...

Soil moisture is an important factor in the global hydrologic cycle, but existing reconstructions of historic soil moisture are limited. We used tree-ring chronologies to reconstruct annual soil moisture in the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB). Gridded soil moisture data were spatially regionalized using principal components analysis and k-nearest neighbor techniques. We correlated moisture se...

In the present work, we present a new formulation for the estimation of the soil moisture in the root zone based on the measured value of soil moisture at the surface. The method sheds lights on the relationship between surface and root zone soil moisture. It derives from a simplified form of the soil water balance equation and provides a closed form of the relationship between the root zone an...

Soil moisture is one of the most important variables that influences the soil-vegetation-atmosphere fluxes. This is particularly true over the Sahelian region, soil moisture has an important feedback on precipitation. It is particularly difficult to access to soil moisture values because its high temporal and spatial variability. Different approaches exist, but microwave remote sensing is the m...

The upcoming deployment of satellite-based microwave sensors designed specifically to retrieve surface soil moisture represents an important milestone in efforts to develop hydrologic applications for remote sensing observations. However, typical measurement depths of microwave-based soil moisture retrievals are generally considered too shallow (top 2–5 cm of the soil column) for many important...