A universal calibration function for determination of soil moisture with cosmic-ray neutrons
By Trenton Franz, Marek Zreda, Rafael Rosolem, Ty Paul Andrew Ferré. 2012
134 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A cosmic-ray soil moisture probe is usually cali- brated locally using soil samples collected within its support volume. But such calibration may be difficult or impracti- cal, for example when soil contains stones, in presence of bedrock outcrops, in urban environments, or when the probe is used as a rover. Here we use the neutron transport code MCNPx with observed soil chemistries and pore water dis- tribution to derive a universal calibration function that can be used in such environments. Reasonable estimates of pore water content can be made from neutron intensity measure- ments and by using measurements of the other hydrogen pools (water vapor, soil lattice water, soil organic carbon, and biomass). Comparisons with independent soil moisture mea- surements at one cosmic-ray probe site and, separately, at 35 sites, show that the universal calibration function explains more than 79 % of the total variability within each dataset, permitting accurate isolation of the soil moisture signal from the measured neutron intensity signal. In addition the frame- work allows for any of the other hydrogen pools to be sep- arated from the neutron intensity measurements, which may be useful for estimating changes in biomass, biomass water, or exchangeable water in complex environments.
Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Geophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4e23495d73f9a06ca7cb3e9b0007ab54d9f35a66
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Citations in the corpus
- Footprint characteristics revised for field‐scale soil moisture monitoring with cosmic‐ray neutrons (2015, methodology): “The accepted method equally weights point measurements from three distinct radii [Zreda et al., 2012; Franz et al., 2012a] which correspond to an exponential weighting function (see section 2.4).”