Uchimizu: A Cool(ing) Tradition to Locally Decrease Air Temperature

The urban heat island effect was first described 200 years ago, but the development of ways to mitigate heat in urban areas reaches much further into the past. Uchimizu is a 17th century Japanese tradition, in which water is sprinkled around houses to cool the ground surface and air by evaporation. Unfortunately, the number of published studies...

Mapping variability of soil water content and flux across 1–1000 m scales using the Actively Heated Fiber Optic method

The Actively Heated Fiber Optic (AHFO) method is shown to be capable of measuring soil water content several times per hour at 0.25 m spacing along cables of multiple kilometers in length. AHFO is based on distributed temperature sensing (DTS) observation of the heating and cooling of a buried fiber-optic cable resulting from an electrical...

Shade estimation over streams using distributed temperature sensing

The characterization of temporal and spatial distribution of sunlight is essential for understanding energy transport in natural ecosystems. Fiber?optic distributed temperature sensing (DTS) allows meter resolution measurements of temperature at subminute resolution. The difference in temperature due to absorption and reflection of a pair of...