Department of Biological & Agricultural Engineering
Dr. Binayak Mohanty and his Vadose Zone Research Group are leading efforts to describe root zone soil water flow mechanisms.
Understanding water movement in soil is critical for many earth science studies on a local to global scale. Traditional ground-based measurement techniques are limited to small-scale studies. Recently, with the deployment of Earth-observing satellites like the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) and Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellites, researchers have gained opportunities to measure soil water retention and hydraulic properties from space.
Funded by NASA through its Science Utilization of SMAP (SUSMAP) project, Dr. Binayak Mohanty and his Vadose Zone Research Group are leading efforts to describe root zone soil water flow mechanisms. They’re also working to estimate effective hydraulic properties at various spatial scales – ranging from field plot, watershed, and river basin regions to the entire continent – using space-borne sensors. SMAP is measuring soil moisture over a three-year period, every two to three days. This permits changes around the world to be observed over time scales ranging from major storms to repeated measurements of changes over seasons.
The team’s proposed remote-sensing, modeling and scaling approach will be evaluated in different hydro-climatic regions such as humid Iowa, semi-humid Oklahoma and semi-arid Arizona. Measuring soil hydraulic properties in complex landscapes and multiple scales from remotely sensed soil moisture data will help researchers develop new models. It will also have a tremendous impact on their ability to predict terrestrial hydrology, agriculture, weather, climate change and global circulation of water, energy and chemicals in the environment.
NASA’s SUSMAP project is based on Mohanty’s group’s successful proof-of-concept demonstration over the past decade. The Vadose Zone Research Group carries out research on a wide spectrum of topics related to the unsaturated zone, like numerical modeling of hydrological processes, soil biogeochemistry, scaling issues in hydrology, and field-scale observations and measurements.
Mohanty has also led the establishment of the Texas Water Observatory (http://two.tamu.edu) in the Brazos river corridor as a ground-based observational platform for testing many of these remote-sensing-based science applications.
Read the original story about Dr. Mohanty’s research.