[1] The radar backscattering coefficient is mainly determined by surface soil moisture, vegetation and land surface roughness under a given configuration of the satellite sensor. It is observed that the temporal variations of the three variables are different, the variation of vegetation and roughness are at the longer temporal scales corresponding to climate and cultivation practices, while so...

Comparisons to ground-based surface soil moisture estimates are necessary to evaluate the capability of remote sensors to determine soil moisture and its spatiotemporal variability. Soil moisture can be especially variable in regions of complex terrain which exhibit large variations in vegetation, soil properties and hydrologic conditions. The objective of this study is to evaluate the spatiote...

Grain storage managers could improve the quality of stored grain if they could directly monitor stored grain moisture content, which is a key indicator of stored grain quality and an early indicator of deterioration. However, currently available sensors are too expensive and lack the necessary reliability in that harsh environment. A new fringing field capacitive (FFC) sensor was tested to dete...

Maintaining a good irrigation system is a necessity in today’s water scarcity environment. This paper describes a new approach for automated Smart Irrigation (SIR) system in agricultural management. Using various types of sensors in the crop field area, temperature and moisture value of the soil is monitored. Based on the sensed data, SIR will automatically decide about the necessary action for...

Radar based surface soil moisture retrieval has been subject of intense research during the last decades. However, the space-borne radar sensors available so far provided single configuration observations where the influence of surface roughness generally caused the solution of the backscattering process to be ill posed. The availability of SAR sensors with polarimetric capabilities, such as RA...

1.1 Statement of problem Estimation of soil moisture using microwave remote sensors holds great promise for many applications, including numerical weather prediction and agriculture. However, a scale disparity exists between the resolutions of future satellite-borne microwave remote sensor data (30-60 km) and the much finer scales at which soil moisture estimates are desired (~ 1 km). Hydrology...

Solar power is used as only the source of power to control the overall system. Sensors are placed on the paddy field and these sensors continuously sense the water content and give the message to the farmer. Without visiting the paddy fields, farmers can get the information about the Moisture content and farmer can control the pump set by sending a message from his cellular phone even from a re...

Software for two dimensional visualization of values that have been automatically measured with in place sensors is difficult to find. Usually these programs assume a regular area and a regular grid of measuring points. In practice, however, both the shape of the area and the position of the sensors are often irregular. This paper describes the program TDRFree, which visualizes the soil moistur...

Soil moisture sensors can help to reduce the amount of water needed for irrigation. In this paper we describe the PlantCare soil moisture sensor as a new type of heat dissipation sensor, its calibration and the correction for temperature changes. With the PlantCare sensor it is possible to measure the matric potential indirectly to monitor or control irrigation. This sensor is based on thermal ...