A comparison between laser, needle-like and meshboard techniques for soil roughness measurements

The objective of this work is to compare soil roughness measurements obtained using three different profilers: the first one is a sophisticated laser jointly developed by ESA and CESBIO; the second and third ones are a needle-like mechanical device and a meshboard profiler developed at ITIS and LHWM, respectively. The analysed data sets consist of roughness measurements acquired over the Matera site (Italy) and the Marestain site (France) in 1998 and 2000, respectively. Over the Matera site, laser and needle-like roughness profiles have been measured for one smooth and one rough field. Over the Marestain site, roughness profiles using the laser and the meshboard techniques have been collected over one medium rough soil. The paper compares the estimates of roughness parameters, i.e. the rms-height (s) and correlation length (1), obtained with the different methods, as a function of the number of profiles recorded (N) and of their length (L).