Month-long integrations with a regional climate model covering Europe and the Northern Atlantic are utilized to study the sensitivity of the summertime European precipitation climate with respect to the continental-scale soil moisture content. Experiments are conducted for July 1990 and 1993. For each of the two months, the control experiment with the initial soil water distribution derived fro...

Roots of all plant species need oxygen for growth, and most crops are supplied with oxygen mainly from soil air. Poor aeration is generally a problem only in wet soils. In compacted soils both large mechanical impedance and poor aeration inhibit the growth of roots and may lead to yield reductions. In this study, the variation in soil air composition, N2O emission and several environmental vari...

much has been learned in recent years about the factors affecting reflection of sunlight by soils, the influence Knowledge of how surface roughness influences the reflectance of of w on albedo of rough soil surfaces is still poorly sunlight from cultivated soils is useful in various applications, such as estimating albedo values used as inputs to soil temperature models understood (Cresswell et...

An environmental soil survey to detect Burkholderia pseudomallei was performed during the dry and wet seasons in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia. Soil was sampled at regular intervals during a 15-month period at different depths from areas which were representative of the local, soil environment. Selective culture techniques using Ashdown's and Galimand and Dodin's methods and the polymer...

We investigated the effects of recent moisture history on the relative production of N2O and N2 during denitrification in soil from cropped and successional ecosystems. The soils were pedogenically identical but had been managed differently for the past decade. Sieved soils were amended with nitrate, glucose, and water. Long-wet and short-wet incubations received 80 and 0%, respectively, of pre...

Concurrent measurements of evaporation, leaf conductance, irradiance, leaf water potential, and osmotic potential of maize (Zea mays L. cv. Pa602A) in soil at either high or low soil water potential were compared at several hours on two consecutive days in July. Hourly evaporation, measured on two weighing lysimeters, was similar until 1000 hours Eastern Standard Time, but thereafter evaporatio...

Equations used to calculate erodibility in the Water Erosion Prediction Project soil erosion Ž . model WEPP are based on erodibility studies in the USA and may not function well in another Ž . region. This study was conducted to: i analyze erodibility and infiltration characteristics of some Ž . predominant soils of southern Spain, and ii test equations used to calculate interrill erodibility i...

Nutrient availability greatly regulates ecosystem processes and functions of tropical forests. However, few studies have explored impacts of N addition (aN), P addition (aP) and N × P interaction on tropical forests N₂O fluxes. We established an N and P addition experiment in a tropical forest to test whether: (1) N addition would increase N₂O emission and nitrification, and (2) P addition woul...

A previously developed reflectance-based crop coeJficient (Kcr) for corn, estimated from the normalized difference vegetation index (ND VI), has been shown to overestimate the basal crop coe~cient (KeQ for corn by 24% or more when used with a dark-colored soil. This overestimation occurs because the NDVI produces larger index values for the same vegetation amount over dark backgrounds. Thus, th...