Accurate observations and simulations of soil moisture phasal forms are crucial in cold region hydrological studies. In the seasonally frozen ground of eastern Tibetan Plateau, water vapor, liquid, and ice coexist in the frost‐susceptible silty‐loam soil during winter. Quantification of soil ice content is thus vital in the investigation and understanding of the region's freezing‐thawing processes. This study focuses on the retrieval of soil ice content utilizing the in situ soil moisture (i.e., liquid phase) and cosmic ray neutron measurements (i.e., total water including liquid and ice), with Observing System Simulation Experiments. To derive the total soil water from neutron counts, different weighting methods (revised, conventional, and uniform) for calibrating the cosmic‐ray neutron probe (CRNP) were intercompared. The comparison showed that the conventional nonlinear method performed the best. Furthermore, to assimilate fast neutrons using the particle filter, the STEMMUS‐FT (Simultaneous Transfer of Energy, Mass and Momentum in Unsaturated Soil) model was used as the physically based process model, and the COSMIC model (Cosmic‐ray Soil Moisture Interaction Code) used as the observation operator (i.e., forward neutron simulator). Other than background inputs from disturbed initializations in the STEMMUS‐FT, model uncertainties were predefined to assimilate fast neutrons. We observed that with enough spread of uncertainties, the updated states could mimic the CRNP observation. In all setups, assimilating CRNP measurements could enhance total soil water analyses, which consequently led to the improved detection of soil ice content and therefore the freezing thawing‐process at the field scale.

Meteorological data is useful for varied applications and sectors ranging from weather and climate forecasting, landscape planning to disaster management among others. However, the availability of these data requires a good network of manual meteorological stations and other support systems for its collection, recording, processing, archiving, communication and dissemination. In sub-Saharan Africa, such networks are limited due to low investment and capacity. To bridge this gap, the National Meteorological Services in Kenya and few others from African countries have moved to install a number of Automatic Weather Stations (AWSs) in the past decade including a few additions from private institutions and individuals. Although these AWSs have the potential to improve the existing observation network and the early warning systems in the region, the quality and capacity of the data collected from the stations are not well exploited. This is mainly due to low confidence, by data users, in electronically observed data. In this study, we set out to confirm that electronically observed data is of comparable quality to a human observer recorded data, and can thus be used to bridge data gaps at temporal and spatial scales. To assess this potential, we applied the simple Pearson correlation method and other statistical tests and approaches by conducting inter-comparison analysis of weather observations from the manual synoptic station and data from two Automatic Weather Stations

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<p>Dual source energy balance models are often used in estimating and partitioning evapotranspiration between the soil and vegetation. The use of multi-angular remotely-sensed thermal data in such methods makes them susceptible to directional anisotropy (hotspot) effects that may result from the satellite’s geometry, relative to the sun, at overpass time. It is therefore important to have these effects accounted for to ensure realistic flux retrievals irrespective of sensor viewing position. At present, dual source models generally interpret surface temperature according to two sources, which may be insufficient to adequately represent the limiting temperature conditions that not only depend on the source type but also their exposure to the sun. Here, we present an extended SPARSE (Soil Plant Atmosphere Remote Sensing Evapotranspiration) scheme, wherein the original SPARSE is extended to incorporate sunlit/shaded soil/vegetation elements and coupled with a radiative transfer model that links these four component emissions to out-of-canopy radiances as observed by remote sensors. An initial evaluation is carried out to check the model’s capability in retrieving surface fluxes over diverse environments instrumented with in-situ thermo-radiometers. When run with nadir-acquired thermal data, which have no hotspot signal influence, both algorithms show, as expected, no observable difference in their retrieval of total fluxes. We nonetheless show that by incorporating the solar direction and discriminating between sunlit and shaded elements, the partitioning of these overall fluxes between the soil and vegetation can be improved especially in water stressed environments. We also test the sensitivity of flux and component temperature estimates to the viewing direction of the thermal sensor by using two sets of TIR data (nadir and oblique) to force the models and show that angular sensitivity is reduced. This is key particularly when using high spatial and temporal data from earth observation missions that inherently have to consider a wide-range of viewing angles in their design.</p><p>Keywords: Evapotranspiration, thermal infrared (TIR), Soil Vegetation Atmosphere Transfer (SVAT), temperature inversion.</p>