This paper presents an evaluation of AMSR (Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer) soil moisture products, based on the comparison with three ground soil moisture networks. The selected ground sites are representative of various climatic, hydrologic and environmental conditions in temperate and semi-arid areas. They are located in the south-west of France, in the south-east of Australia and in ...

Soil moisture is an important factor for vegetation restoration and ecosystem sustainability in the Loess Plateau of China. The strong spatial heterogeneity of soil moisture is controlled by many environmental factors, including topography and land use. Moreover, the spatial patterns and soil hydrological processes depend on the scale of the site being investigated, which creates a challenge fo...

This research is a study on the relationship of irrigation water treatments and soil moisture distribution uniformity (DU). Soil moisture distribution was based on long-term data sets that were collected during wet and dry soil conditions (from permanent wilting point to field capacity) using a novel electromagnetic sensor-based platform moving inside subsurface horizontal access-tubes. The irr...

Correct knowledge of soil moisture is important for improving the prediction of coupled land surface atmosphere interactions. This is due to the control that soil moisture exerts on the latent and sensible heat flux transfer between the land surface and atmosphere. Because of this strong dependence on moisture availability, improved atmospheric prediction requires correct initialisation of soil...

Using 19 years of Chinese soil moisture data from 1981-1999, we evaluate soil moisture in three reanalysis outputs: ERA40, NCEP/NCAR reanalysis (R-1), and NCEP/DOE reanalysis 2 (R-2) over China. R-2 shows better interannual variability and seasonal patterns of soil moisture than R-1 as the result of incorporation of observed precipitation. ERA40 produces a better mean value of soil moisture for...

Soil moisture can significantly influence atmospheric evolution. However the soil moisture state predicted by land surface models, and subsequently used as the boundary condition in atmospheric models, is often unrealistic. New remote sensing technologies are able to observe surface soil moisture at the scales and coverage required by numerical weather prediction (NWP), and there is potential t...

[1] There is considerable evidence that future global climate change will increase temperature and alter precipitation regime. To better understand how these factors will influence soil water dynamics, it is imperative to use multifactorial experiments. A 1 year “pulse” experiment, with 4°C warming and a doubling in precipitation, was performed to evaluate the changes in soil moisture dynamics....

A good knowledge of the quality of the satellite soil moisture products is of great importance for their application and improvement. This paper examines the performance of eight satellite-based soil moisture products, including the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) passive Level 3 (L3), the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) Centre Aval de Traitement des Données SMOS (CATDS) L3, the Jap...

Robust models for predicting soil salinity that use visible and near-infrared (vis-NIR) reflectance spectroscopy are needed to better quantify soil salinity in agricultural fields. Currently available models are not sufficiently robust for variable soil moisture contents. Thus, we used external parameter orthogonalization (EPO), which effectively projects spectra onto the subspace orthogonal to...

Large-scale simulation of the soil-derived dust emission in semi-arid regions needs to account for the in ̄uence of the soil moisture on the wind erosion threshold. Soil water retention consists of molecular adsorption on the soil grain surface and capillary forces between the grain. Interparticle capillary forces (characterized by the moisture tension) are the main factor responsible for the in...