Karl Bambynek, Siris Environmental Ltd
Soil moisture is the quantity of water contained in a specific soil. It is used in many scientific and technical areas including hydrology, agriculture, flood monitoring and drought monitoring. Metasphere systems measure volumetric water content and the soil water content profile with up to 10 discrete sensors connected to a single system.
In agriculture, knowing when to irrigate and by how much can have a significant impact on yield, as well as the costs involved with sourcing water and the nutrients that can be needlessly washed away by over-watering.
The ideal soil moisture systems can utilise different types of soil moisture probes, which can give soil moisture readings over a number of monitoring points as well as a soil moisture (depth) profile.
The Metasphere Point Colour Range can be connected to up to 10 soil moisture, or soil moisture profile, probes using the SDI-12 protocol. Additional rain gauges can be connected to the Point Colour RTU to give a more complete picture of the current irrigation needs by providing information on time of rainfall and accumulation data.
User-defined alarms can be used to automatically inform the client when levels of soil moisture drop to a point which will have a negative affect on the crop. Conversely, irrigation can be delayed or even cancelled.
Data can also be sent to both FTP and DNP3 servers where subsequent alarms can be generated by the user, or data can be used to perform control functions.
THE METASPHERE PRODUCT RANGE
