Research and Application of Cosmic-ray Fast Neutron Method to Measure Soil Moisture in the Field

It is very difficult to measure large region soil moisture. In recent years, measurement of surface soil moisture by the cosmic ray fast neutron probe has gradually attracted more attention. By this passive, non-invasive and intermediate scale measurement, soil moisture at a horizontal scale of around 300 m can be observed, which makes this method available to fill the gap between little scale of traditional point measurement and large scale of remote sensing in the measurement of soil moisture. In this paper, Cosmic-ray Soil Moisture Observing System (COSMOS) and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) were used to observe field soil moisture in Zhangye Oasis. The results of the COSMOS soil moisture well reflected the variation trend of soil moisture at the field scale. There were some regular changes with the cosmic ray soil moisture during the irrigation period. Combined with irrigation data in cosmic-ray probe footprint, a bimodal change was showed in the cosmic-ray soil moisture figure during irrigation period. This was because that the order of irrigation of the three communities was different in cosmic-ray probe footprint. WSN data were used to validate this result and we found that root-mean-square error between cosmic-ray soil moisture and SoilNET average soil moisture was very large during irrigation periods because of the impact of cosmic-ray measurement theory. While root-mean-square error would decrease from 0.037 m³/m³ to 0.028 m³/m³ after we eliminated the data in irrigation period. So COSMOS can be used to measure field soil moisture under high heterogeneity condition and provide truly ground data for the validation of remote sensing