Comparison of Daily Soil Water Contents Obtained by Energy Balance-Water Budget Approach and TDR

The daily soil water contents were obtained from the time domain reflectometry(TDR) method and energy balance-water budget approach with eddy correlation at the two small semiarid watersheds of Lucky Hills and Kendall during the summer rainy period. There was a comaprison of daily soil water content measured and estimated from these two different approaches. The comparison is valuable to evaluate the accuracy of current soil water content measuring system using TDR and energy balance-water budget approach using eddy correlation method at a small watershed scale. The degree of simiarity between the regressions of these two methods of measuring soil water content was explained by determining the correlations between these methods. Simple linear regression analyses showed that soil water content measured from TDR method was responsible for 58% and 63% of the variations estimated from energy balance-water budget approach with edy correlation at Lucky Hills and Kendall, respectively. The scatter plots and the regression analyses revealed that two different approaches for soil water content measurement at a small watershed scale have no significant difference.