- 1Irish Meteorological Services (Met Éireann), Dublin, Ireland (Klara.Finkele@met.ie)
- 2Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Bristol, UK (Rafael.Rosolem@bristol.ac.uk)
- 3UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Wallingford, UK (jge@ceh.ac.uk)
- 4Dept. Monitoring and Exploration Technologies, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig, Germany (martin.schroen@ufz.de)
- 5UCD Forestry, UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science, University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland (brian.tobin@ucd.ie)
- 6School of Natural Sciences, National University Ireland – Galway, Ireland (eve.daly@universityofgalway.ie)
Field-scale Soil Moisture (SM) is an important variable to derive and study agriculture, plant growth, nutrient management, water quality and management, soil carbon sequestration, groundwater availability, flood forecasting, forest fire risk, land surface models and is an Essential Climate Variable (ECV). Field-scale SM estimates are vital due to small scale soil heterogeneities and can fill the gap between the traditional in-situ point measurements and products derived from remote sensing.
The Cosmic-Ray Neutron Sensor (CRNS) technology detects and counts naturally occurring fast neutrons (generated by cosmic-rays) after they are slowed primarily by hydrogen atoms in soil water and biomass. The CRNS can measure the root-zone SM at field-scale in a non-invasive way to an effective depth of 10 to 70 cm depending on soil water content and over a footprint of around 300 m diameter.
The AGMET group (Working Group of Applied Agricultural Meteorology in Ireland) instigated the Irish Soil Moisture Observation Network (ISMON) in 2021 and installed ten CRNS stations across Ireland, covering a range of soil types, with a view to estimating regional soil moisture conditions more accurately.
In this study, we present the SM estimates recorded since 2021 at two different ISMON sites in Ireland. In each of these sites, the CRNS sensor is co-located with arrays of Time-Domain Reflectometry (TDR) in-situ sensors. The first site is an agricultural grazing system on a mineral soil at the ISMON Farmer’s Journal farm site in Tullamore, County Offaly. The second site locates in a forest setting at the ISMON Dooray forest in County Laois. The CRNS measurements are calibrated based on soil sampling campaigns and the CRNS derived SM products are compared with TDR measurements for validation. The effect of the soil types and vegetation cover on the final SM estimates are investigated.
How to cite: Karbala Ali, H., Finkele, K., Rosolem, R., Evans, J., Schrön, M., Tobin, B., and Daly, E.: Challenges and Opportunities with Soil Moisture Measurement in Ireland using Cosmic-Ray Neutron Sensing: Examples from an agriculture and a forest site, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-3236, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-3236, 2025.
