Study of emissivity changes presented by inorganic and organic soil under drying at ambient temperature

Thermal emissivity can be used to determine the moisture content in soils, but it is strongly influenced by the kind of soil and the organic matter content. These experiments were performed by recording infrared images of the wet soils as a function of water loss. Samples with different organic matter content were wet until reach the field capacity; then, a sequence of thermal images was acquired to follow the different stages of drying process of the studied samples. The emissivity was calculated indirectly by measuring the reflection and absorption of the samples.