Use of remotely sensed soil moisture to determine soil hydraulic properties

Laboratory and field methods for determining soil hydraulic properties are time consuming and expensive. An alternative approach is to use pedotransfer functions which predict various soil hydraulic properties based on more readily available physical properties. Pedotransfer functions have been developed that operate with various levels of information. Greater available information yields more reliable estimates of any particular hydraulic property. Because some of the physical properties being used in pedotransfer functions are not available on a regional scale, there is a need to develop pedotransfer functions for use with regional soil databases. A system is described that uses soil texture classes and remotely sensed soil moisture in the dry state to estimate soil hydraulic properties at a 800 m pixel scale.