COSMOS: Landscape-Scale Soil Moisture

This project explores the use of a COSMOS sensor to measure landscape-scale soil moisture. COSMOS measures the cosmic rays that penetrate and bounce off the top 15-cm of the land surface in a radius of 500-meters. The signal is changed by the presence of water: standing water, soil water, and plant water – and returns an integrated signal of all water in the root zone, both above and below the shallow surface. As the landscape surface is transformed into a wetland, we hope the COSMOS data will document the increasing moisture at and near the land surface needed for the survival of wetland plants.