Hi, my name is Dr. Colin Campbell. I’m a senior research scientist here at METER Group, and in this course, we’re going to be talking about water content. Finally, I’m just going to talk briefly about common issues you’ll see in the field and things you can use to help get over these.
One thing you have got to do when you go to the field, take a ZSC. If you don’t know what that is, go look on the METER website. This is a way that you can just do a spot check on your sensors to make sure that reality connects to what you’re reading on the screen. Super useful, because all you need is a smartphone to read it over Bluetooth, and you can make the measurements and check them right away.
The next thing you ought to think about is the sensor you’re going to purchase. TEROS 11 and 12 have been optimized here at METER Group, so every sensor reads exactly like another sensor. You can depend on the fact that there’s very low sensor to sensor variability.
If you’re ever in doubt about the reading of your sensor, talk to our support team. You can grab a verification clip from them, and you can verify that your sensors are reading just like they should. Now, one thing I would suggest, and things you probably haven’t thought about, is before you go out to your field site and install these sensors, why don’t you try taking a practice round? Go out to some soil nearby where you are and just install a few sensors.
It’ll be great, especially have as if we have a ZSC, take that out there and just make a measurement and stick a sensor in the soil. Try to pull it out, see what a well installed sensor feels like, as far as how tightly it fits into the soil. Just get a sense for that, a sense for how the sensor should be reading. It’ll help a lot on install day.
And finally, when you’re out in the field, take a little time to repack your soil. Once you dig that insulation hole and you’ve got a nice little bore hole down in the soil, take that soil and put it back into the bore hole, just like you took it out. Okay, so the soil that’s the bottom that you took out of the bottom, put it back in the bottom and install it back in lifts. So I usually take the end of a shovel and just press that soil every 15 centimeters or so to make sure I get a nice compacted soil layer as I go up.
This way, you make sure you don’t get any preferential flow down along your bore hole. It’s really disappointing when water shows up down in that hole and your sensor that’s down on the bottom when it hasn’t even hit the sensor at the top. So just be aware of that. Getting great water content in the field is energizing.
I’ve been experimenting for a lot of years, and I love being able to see these traces happen over time. It opens up a world that we’re totally unaware of, but it does take practice and care to get great measurements, and I hope our discussion today has helped you see some pitfalls that will help you experiment better. Now you’ve learned about water content. I want to encourage you to head over to my other video talking about water potential.
These things go hand in hand, and you need to know about both. Thanks for spending time with me today talking about water content, I want to remind you to head over to metergroup.com especially into our knowledge based section to learn more about water content and ways you can make great measurements. If you have questions, be sure to reach out to people here at METER we’re all here to help your experiments go better.
