Obstacles to long‐term soil moisture monitoring with heated distributed temperature sensing

The field deployment of a heated distributed temperature sensor (DTS) for over three years has revealed two obstacles to estimating soil moisture (θ) that may hamper subsurface DTS applications as well as use of other subsurface thermal probes. The first observed obstacle was a hysteretic response of the DTS sensor. The relationship between θ and the temperature response (?T) within the cable was not only dependent on θ of the soil, but also on the previous wetting and drying cycles leading to that state. The second observed obstacle was soil structure healing. Soil structure healing causes the relationship between ?T and θ to evolve through time; this calibration curve becomes flatter, or less sensitive, as the surrounding soil makes better contact with the cable. Effects of the hysteretic response of the instrument and soil structure healing are largely the result of small gaps between the cable and soil. These small gaps can be approximated by a contact resistance between the cable and soil. In this article we characterize the occurrence of hysteretic and soil structure healing effects from field data and parameterize contact resistance by simulating heat transfer using a numerical modelling approach Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.