HR: 0830h
AN: H41A-06    [Abstracts]
TI: ASSESSMENT USING PASSIVE MICROWAVE REMOTE SENSING AND VADOSE ZONE MODELING
AU: * das, n
EM: nndas@tamu.edu
AF: Texas A&M, BAEN, Texas A&M, TAMU 2117, College station, TX 77843 United States
AU: Mohanty, B P
EM: bmohanty@tamu.edu
AF: Texas A&M, BAEN, Texas A&M, TAMU 2117, College station, TX 77843 United States
AB: Soil moisture is a fundamental state variable and it varies spatially due to topography, soil, precipitation variability and landuse-landcover, and temporally, due to difference in hydrologic characteristics and controls. Many studies have successfully demonstrated the use of passive microwave remote sensing to assess soil moisture mapping information at a depth of 5 cm. Assessing root zone soil moisture through these remotely sensed data could be achieved by integration of remote sensing and computational modeling. This integrated method may become resourceful solution to the problem for profile soil moisture estimation and its transient behavior. This paper describe a model based on GIS distributed hydrologic modeling coupled with HYDRUS-ET to estimate surface and root zone soil water content using surface soil moisture data from ESTAR (SGP 97) with other topographical and hydro-meteorological data. The model estimated root zone soil moisture for the Little Washita watershed at various depths for the entire SGP97 period. The simulated soil moisture at various depths was compared with time-domain reflectometry (TDR) profile measurements. Overall reasonable agreement was found between model estimations and TDR measurements were the pixel soil profile matched with the point soil profile. The model showed great promise and flexibility to incorporate assimilation techniques, scaling and other hydrological complexities.
DE: 1800 HYDROLOGY
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2005 Joint Assembly