Soil water content in southern England derived from a cosmic‐ray soil moisture observing system – COSMOS‐UK

Abstract

Contact CEH NORA team at noraceh@ceh.ac.ukThe NERC and CEH trademarks and logos ('the Trademarks') are registered trademarks of NERC in the UK and other countries, and may not be used without the prior written consent of the Trademark owner.This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Comparison of these soil water content observations with the Joint UK Land EnvironmentSimulator (JULES) 10 cm soil moisture layer shows that these data can be used to test and diagnose model performance, and indicates the potential for assimilation of these data into hydro-meteorological models. The application of these large-area soil water content measurements to evaluate remotely-sensed soil moisture products is also demonstrated.Numerous applications and the future development of a national COSMOS-UK network are discussed.

Earth Observation-Based Operational Estimation of Soil Moisture and Evapotranspiration for Agricultural Crops in Support of Sustainable Water Management

“…Cosmos sensors provide direct field scale measurement of soil moisture to within a c. 150 m radius of the sensor [103]. Recently, Evans et al [104], who described a UK network of ground-based cosmos sensors, showed a reasonable correlation on two different sites (R 2 = 0.46, n = 837 days and R 2 = 0.59, n = 0.59) between soil moisture retrieved from ASCAT (grid 12.5 km 2 ) and the novel ground sensors. These results were achieved despite a mismatch in the spatial resolutions of the ASCAT and cosmos stations.…”

Validation of Spaceborne and Modelled Surface Soil Moisture Products with Cosmic-Ray Neutron Probes

“…Crops are mostly rain fed during the monsoon season and about 15%-20% are irrigated using groundwater, especially during winter. The CNRP data handling procedures for COSMOS-India are based on Evans et al [63]. Other hydrological monitoring in the area includes soil moisture monitoring (Stevens HydraProbes), weather variables (OTT climate station) and groundwater levels in bore wells.…”

“…Moreover, they employed the triple collocation (TC) method [62], but focusing on the TC error only. Evans et al [63] introduced the COSMOS-UK network and compared to the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) hydrological model. A comparison to ASCAT has been presented to show the applicability of such a network.…”

Evaluation of a cosmic-ray neutron sensor network for improved land surface model prediction

“…% soil moisture) (Kohli et al, 2015;Franz et al, 2012). Worldwide several CRNS networks exist, such as the North American COSMOS network , the German CRNS network installed in the context of the TERENO infrastructure measure (Zacharias et al, 2011), the Australian COSMoZ network (Hawdon et al, 2014) and the British COSMOS-UK (Evans et al, 2016).…”