Simulating surface soil moisture on sandy beaches

A model that simulates surface moisture content on sandy beaches for aeolian transport applications is developed and integrated into the aeolian transport model AeoLiS. The moisture content of a thin surface layer (≈2 mm thickness) is computed as a function of wave runup, precipitation, evaporation, percolation, and capillary rise from the...

Internal processes in hydrological models: A glance at the Meuse basin from space

Contemplating the Meuse or any other river of the world, one may wonder about the journey of rain in becoming river. This fascinates hydrologists, as they develop theories to understand movement, storage and release of water through the landscape across climates. These theories are translated to hydrological models, which describe the complex...

Improved Understanding of the Link Between Catchment-Scale Vegetation Accessible Storage and Satellite-Derived Soil Water Index

The spatiotemporal dynamics of water volumes stored in the unsaturated root zone are a key control on the response of terrestrial hydrological systems. Robust, catchment-scale root-zone soil moisture estimates are thus critical for reliable predictions of river flow, groundwater recharge, or evaporation. Satellites provide estimates of near...

What Do Plants Leave after Summer on the Ground?: The Effect of Afforested Plants in Arid Environments

The implementation of afforestation programs in arid environments in northern China had modified the natural vegetation patterns. This increases the evaporation flux; however, the influence of these new covers on the soil water conditions is poorly understood. This work aims to describe the effect of Willow bushes (Salix psammophila C. Wang...

Ecohydrologic separation alters interpreted hydrologic stores and fluxes in a headwater mountain catchment

Recent studies have demonstrated that compartmentalized pools of water preferentially supply either plant transpiration (poorly mobile water) or streamflow and groundwater (highly mobile water) in some catchments, a phenomenon referred to as ecohydrologic separation. The omission of processes accounting for ecohydrologic separation in standard...

The origin of preferential flow and non-equilibrium transport in unsaturated heterogeneous porous systems

Stabilization of waste bodies of landfill is achieved by treating the waste body using irrigation, recycling of leachate combined with landfill gas extraction and/or aeration. In order for the regulators and landfill operators to agree on a required level of after care, a quantitative estimation of remaining long-term emission potential is...

Managing Basin Interdependencies in a Heterogeneous, Highly Utilized and Data Scarce River Basin in Semi-Arid Africa: The case of the Pangani River Basin, Eastern Africa

For integrated water resources management both blue and green water resources in a river basin and their spatial and temporal distribution have to be considered. This is because green and blue water uses are interdependent. In sub-Saharan Africa, the upper landscapes are often dominated by rainfed and supplementary irrigated agriculture that...

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...

Effect of soil roughness on the inversion of off-ground monostatic GPR signal for noninvasive quantification of soil properties

We report on a laboratory experiment that investigates the effect of soil surface roughness on the identification of the soil electromagnetic properties from full-wave inversion of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data in the frequency domain. The GPR system consists of an ultrawide band stepped-frequency continuous-wave radar combined with an off...

OMS Ondersteunende omgeving en componenten: GIS inventory