Recent  

In airborne survey, dynamic flight conditions cause unequal data levels, which seriously impact airborne geophysical data analysis and interpretation. A new technique is proposed to level geophysical data in view of the image space properties. We have confirmed the reliability of the method by applying it to the airborne electromagnetic, magnetic and apparent-conductivity data. The method can automatically extract leveling errors without the participation of staff members or tie-line control.

Soil evaporation is one of the most important water vapor sources on the Earth with multiple and severe consequences; however, there is a relative lack of instruments to measure it. This study describes a simple apparatus making the soil evaporation measurement accessible. The soil evaporation complexity is overcome by measuring the evaporation dynamic under different measurement conditions. A relatively simple measurement correction is then performed depending on the wind speed.

The quality control and validation activities performed by the Swarm data quality team reveal the good-quality LPs. The analysis demonstrated that the current baseline plasma data products are improved with respect to previous baseline. The LPs have captured the ionospheric plasma variability over more than half of a solar cycle, revealing the data quality dependence on the solar activity. The quality of the LP data will further improve promotion of their application to a broad range of studies.

In recent years, imaging of density inside volcanoes using cosmic-ray muons has been studied. In some previous studies, observations were conducted in 2 or 3 directions to obtain 3D resolution. For higher resolution, we tried to observe a volcano from 11 directions using special photographic films. The observation and analytical techniques developed in this study may be applied to other volcanoes and large objects. Reconstructing 3D images of the volcano is in progress using the obtained data.

We present an experiment intended to enable extremely low-noise magnetic field measurements. We manufactured fluxgate magnetometer cores using two metal alloys, two geometries, two foil thicknesses, and six different heat treatments and compared the resulting material properties, power consumption, and magnetic noise. Our results suggest that thinner foils, potentially using a new copper alloy, manufactured into continuous racetrack washers may provide excellent performance in fluxgate sensors.

Cosmic-ray neutron sensing (CRNS) is a non-invasive tool for measuring hydrogen pools like soil moisture, snow, or vegetation. This study presents a directional shielding approach, aiming to measure in specific directions only. The results show that non-directional neutron transport blurs the signal of the targeted direction. For typical instruments, this does not allow acceptable precision at a daily time resolution. However, the mere statistical distinction of two rates is feasible.

Better monitoring of soil carbon sequestration is needed to understand the best carbon farming practices in different soils and climate conditions. We, the Field Observatory Network (FiON), have therefore established a methodology for monitoring and forecasting agricultural carbon sequestration by combining offline and near-real-time field measurements, weather data, satellite imagery, and modeling. To disseminate our work, we built a website called the Field Observatory (fieldobservatory.org).