A one-dimensional hydrology/radiobrightness model for freezing/thawing soils

Soil temperature and moisture profiles play a crucial role in governing energy and moisture fluxes between bare soils and the atmosphere. These profiles also co-determine radiobrightness so that the difference between model-predicted and observed radiobrightness becomes a measure of error in a model´s estimate of temperature or moisture. The authors present a physically based, coupled moisture and temperature, one-dimensional hydrology/radiobrightness (1dH/R) model for bare soil that is subject to freezing and thawing. They use this model to predict thermal, hydrologic, and radiobrightness signatures for a three-month simulation period in fall/winter on the northern Great Plains as part of an investigation of the influence of water transport on these signatures. Given a typical initial moisture content of 38%, they find that the difference in surface liquid water content between water transport and no water transport cases grows to 19% during the three-month period, and that the difference in surface ice content reaches 21% over the same period. The diurnal radiobrightness variation differs between the two cases by as much as 37 Kelvin