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...

Soil moisture is critical parameters in climatic and hydrological modeling and vegetation growth. Ground-based point measurement of soil moisture is liable but expensive and impractical for watershed measurement. Remote sensing measurement has provided thriving perspective for spatial and instantaneous measurement of soil moisture. Microwave measurement is effective and successful for surface s...

Soil moisture status in the root zone is an important component of the water cycle at all spatial scales (e.g., point, field, catchment, watershed, and region). In this study, the spatio-temporal evolution of root zone soil moisture of the Walnut Gulch Experimental Watershed (WGEW) in Arizona was investigated during the Soil Moisture Experiment 2004 (SMEX04). Root zone soil moisture was estimat...

The importance of spatial variability of antecedent soil moisture conditions on runoff response is widely acknowledged in hillslope hydrology. Using a distributed hydrologic model, this paper aims at investigating the effects of soil moisture spatial variability on runoff in various field conditions and at finding the structure of the soil moisture pattern that approaches the measured soil mois...

Multiple soil moisture products have been generated from data acquired by satellite. However, these satellite soil moisture products are not spatially or temporally complete, primarily due to track changes, radio-frequency interference, dense vegetation, and frozen soil. These deficiencies limit the application of soil moisture in land surface process simulation, climatic modeling, and global c...

[1] The cosmic-ray neutron probe measures soil moisture over tens of hectares, thus averaging spatially variable soil moisture fields. A previous paper described how variable soil moisture profiles affect the integrated cosmic-ray neutron signal from which depthaverage soil moisture is computed. Here, we investigate the effect of horizontal heterogeneity on the relationship between neutron coun...

a r t i c l e i n f o The aim of this study is to analyze the influence of the soil moisture sampling depth in the parameterization of soil emission in microwave radiometry at L-band. The analysis is based on brightness temperature, soil moisture and temperature measurements acquired over a bare soil during the SMOSREX experiment. A more detailed profile of surface soil moisture was obtained wi...

The COsmic-ray Soil Moisture Observing System (COSMOS) rover may be useful for validating satellite-based estimates of near-surface soil moisture, but the accuracy with which the rover can measure 0to 5-cm soil moisture has not been previously determined. Our objectives were to calibrate and validate a COSMOS rover for mapping 0to 5-cm soil moisture at spatial scales suitable for evaluating sat...

The soil surface layer is a critical boundary between land and atmosphere, and soil moisture is a critical condition affecting interaction of land surface and atmosphere. The root zone can be defined as the top 100 cm of the soil layer. Remotely sensed data can indirectly measure soil moisture, but the signal only penetrates the top few centimeters, so soil moisture at deeper layers must be est...

The growth and yield of crops in the arid and semi-arid regions of the world is driven by the amount of soil moisture available to the crop through rainfall and irrigation. Various methods have been developed for quantifying the soil moisture status of agricultural crops. Recent technological advances in remote sensing have shown that soil moisture can be measured with a variety of remote sensi...