A monitoring campaign of soil moisture along a hillslope transect of the experimental basin of Corleto.

Characterizing the spatial dynamics of soil moisture is a key issue in hydrology, offering an avenue to improve our understanding of complex land surface-atmosphere interactions. In this paper, the statistical structure of soil moisture patterns is examined using soil moisture measurements over a hillslope transect of the experimental basin “Fiumarella of Corleto”, located in Southern of Italy. The instrumental system installed is composed by a TDR100 system connected, through three multiplexters, to 22 probes located in 11 sampling sites at two different depths of 30 and 60cm. The datalogger is a CR10X produced by Campbell Scientific that transmits the soil moisture values, elaborated by the TDR100, in real time via the GSM network. The installation covers a transect of about 60 meters and sampling frequency is 1 hour. Soil moisture measurements at two distinguished depths showed significantly different temporal dynamics. The spatial structure of soil moisture has been investigated displaying two distinguished behaviour during the dry and wet periods being this last strongly influenced by the soil water redistribution. The preliminary results of this field campaign are reported in the present paper. Key-Words: soil moisture, Time Domain Reflectometer (TDR), field experiments and river basin.