Shortwave radiation affected by agricultural practices

Abstract

The albedo of bare soil depends on its organic matter, iron oxide, carbonate contents, and reflectance geometry, features considered stable over time, and also depends on salinity, moisture and roughness, which change dynamically due to agricultural practices. This paper deals with the quantitative estimation of the amount of shortwave radiation that could be reflected by air-dried bare soils in clear-sky conditions within arable lands in Israel throughout the year, assuming that they were shaped by a plough, a disk harrow, or a smoothing harrow. An area of bare soils was extracted from Landsat 8 images, within the contours of arable lands. The radiation reflected from the bare soils was calculated by equations predicting variations in their half-diurnal albedo as the solar zenith angle function. Accordingly, laboratory reflectance data of Israeli soil samples were used. The results clearly showed annual variation in the amount of short-wave radiation reflected from all bare soils within arable lands. The minimum radiation occurred in the winter, between the 1st and 70th day of the year (DOY), and the maximum was identified in the summer between 200th and 250th DOY. This could reach about 3-5 PJ/day and 16-23 PJ/day, respectively.