Active Distributed Temperature Sensing to Characterise Soil Moisture and Heat Dynamics of a Vegetated Hillslope.

Abstract:

Complex correlated water and heat dynamics characterise the land surface and shallow subsurface, as consequence of the concurrent action of multiple transport processes.

Point sensors and/or remote techniques show limitations in providing precise measurements of key indicators of soil heat and water transport such as soil temperature and moisture, at both high spatiotemporal resolution and large areal coverage. Fibre optics Distributed Temperature Sensors (DTS) allow for precise temperature measurement along optical cables of up to several kilometres, sampling at resolutions of up to few centimetres in space and seconds in time. The optical cable is the sensor and can be buried in the soil with minimum disturbance, to construct soil temperature profiles, over large surveying areas.

Soil moisture can be obtained from the analysis of both heating and cooling rates measured by the DTS, when copper conductors embedded in the optical cable are electrically heated (technique known as Active DTS). In July 2015, three loops of optical cable of 500m each have been buried in the soil at different depths (0.05m, 0.25m and 0.40m), along an inclined recently vegetated field in the Birmingham area, UK. Active DTS tests have been set with the aim to characterize the soil temperature and moisture regimes of the field at high spatial resolution, in response to both sporadic events such as showers or scheduled irrigation, and diurnal fluctuations induced by atmospheric forcing.

Spatiotemporal variations of the aforementioned regimes will be used to trace vertical and horizontal soil heat and water movements.

Finally, assumptions on the possibility to correlate soil heat and water dynamics to a specific process such as precipitation, evapotranspiration, soil inclination, will be discussed. This research is part of the Marie Curie Initial Training Network (ITN) INTERFACES project and is realised in the context of the Free Air Carbon Enrichment (FACE) experiment, in collaboration with the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR).