Soil Moisture Monitoring at Watershed Scale in Eastern India

Abstract:

Understanding the spatio-temporal variation of soil moisture on time scales that range from minute to decades on the watershed scale is important for the hydrological, meteorological and agricultural communities. Lack of reliable, longterm soil moisture datasets in developing countries like India, is a bottleneck for soil moisture analysis and prediction. Recognizing the need of continuous, automated in-situ soil moisture observations, three in-situ soil moisture test-beds have been established in an agricultural watershed of the Eastern India. Test-beds have been specifically designed to capture the root zone soil moisture dynamic at different crop fields under both surplus and water deficit conditions in low, medium and up-lands of the study region. Both volumetric and tensiometric method based sensors, Campbell Scientific soil water content reflectometer (CS650) and matric potential sensor (CS229) are installed at depths of 5, 15, 30, 60 and 100 cm below the surface. GPRS communication modems were installed at each station for remote communication from the data loggers (Campbell Scientific, CR1000) for automatic data collection. To achieve a better understanding of the spatial variation of the soil moisture on watershed scale, the strategic ground-based surface measurements were made in diverse landscape using portable impedance probe. The primary aim of spatial and temporal scale soil moisture measurement is to validate current remote sensing products of Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP). In order to improve validation procedure, the soil texture and soil hydraulic parameters are also estimated across the spatial scales to develop dynamic relationship between these parameters. Herein, the strategies for the site selection, calibration of the soil moisture sensors, ground-based soil moisture monitoring, hydraulic properties estimation at spatial scale and the quality assurance techniques applied to the observations are provided.