Faculty

Aaron Berg PhD, University of California, Irvine, 2003 Associate Professor Office: Hutt 131 Tel:519-824-4120 ext. 58514 aberg@uoguelph.ca For more information

Specialization

My area of research focuses on hydrology and remote sensing with applications to agriculture, land-atmosphere interactions and hydro-climatology.

Research Interests and Areas of Expertise

Soil moisture is an important component of the global water and energy cycle and in biogeochemical cycling.  Meteorological conditions such as the near surface air temperature, boundary layer mixing heights and precipitation have been shown to depend, in part, on the soil moisture state.  Accurate and timely soil moisture information has numerous applications in agricultural prediction and assessment, weather and climate prediction and streamflow prediction. Together with my research group we explore issues in hydrology using remote sensing and hydrological models.  Areas of current interest include:

1. Initialization of soil moisture in climate models
   We are contributing to efforts for understanding the role of land surface soil moisture for improvements to precipitation and temperature forecast skill in subseasonal climate forecasts (at lead times of one month or more).  These efforts target techniques for removing bias in meteorological forcing products, and evaluating data assimilation methods for reducing error in soil moisture estimates.
2. Soil Moisture and Remote sensing
   It is clear that any model generated estimate of the soil water state will be subject to error therefore a significant component of my research program has been directed towards the evaluation of soil moisture estimates as predicted by models, from microwave brightness temperatures and through merger in a data assimilation systems. To complete this work we have established two soil moisture-monitoring networks for the evaluation of soil moisture retrieval algorithms, land surface models and data assimilation systems.
3. Applications of soil moisture products
   As soil moisture products from satellite, and models improve numerous applications of these data sets are possible. One aspect of my research program focuses on the development of applications of soil moisture products for agriculture or watershed processes.
   

Selected Recent Publications

a) Initialization of soil moisture in climate models and applications
Alavi, N., G. Drewitt, A.A. Berg and W.J. Merryfield. 2011. Soil moisture initialization affects in the CCCMA AGCM3: Relationship of sub-seasonal climate forecast error to uncertainty in soil moisture initializations. Atmosphere-Ocean. In Press.

Champagne, C, H. McNairn and A.A Berg. 2011. Monitoring Agricultural Soil Moisture Extremes in Canada Using Passive Microwave Remote Sensing. Remote Sensing of Environment. In Press. doi:10.1016/j.rse.2011.04.030

Dumedah G., A.A. Berg and M. Wineberg. 2011. An integrated framework for joint assimilation of brightness temperature and soil moisture using the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm- II. Journal of Hydrometeorology. In Press

Alavi, N., A.A Berg, J.S. Warland, G. Parkin, D. Verseghy and P. Bartlett. 2010. Assimilating soil moisture variability into the CLASS to improve latent heat flux estimation. Canadian Water Resources Journal. 35(2) 1-16.

Koster, R.D., S.P.P. Mahanama, T. J. Yamada, G. Balsamo, A.A. Berg, M. Boisserie, P.A. Dirmeyer, F.J. Doblas-Reyes, G. Drewitt, C.T. Gordon, Z. Guo, J.-H. Jeong, D.M. Lawrence, W.-S. Lee, Z. Li, L. Luo, S. Malyshev, W.J. Merryfield, S.I. Seneviratne, T. Stanelle, B.J.J.M. van den Hurk, F. Vitart, and E.F. Wood. 2010. Contribution of land surface initialization to subseasonal forecast skill: First results from a multi-model experiment. Geophysical Research Letters. 37, L02402, doi:10.1029/2009GL041677

Famiglietti, J., D. Ryu, A. A. Berg, M. Rodell, and T. J. Jackson  2008,  Field Observations of Soil Moisture Variability Across Scales. Water Resources Research. 44, W01423, doi:10.1029/2006WR005804

Berg A.A, J.S. Famiglietti, M. Rodell, U. Jambor, S.L. Holl, R.H. Reichle, and P.R. Houser. 2005. ‘Development of a Hydrometeorological Forcing Data Set for Global Soil Moisture Estimation,’ International Journal of Climatology, 25, 1697-1714.

b) Remote sensing for soil moisture

Champagne C, A.A. Berg, J. Belanger, H. McNairn and R. deJeu. 2010. Evaluation of Soil Moisture Derived from Passive Microwave Remote Sensing Over Agricultural Sites in Canada Using Ground-based Soil Moisture Monitoring Networks. International Journal of Remote Sensing. 31(14) 3669-3690.

Gherboudj, I, R. Magagi, A.A. Berg, and B. Toth. 2011. Soil moisture retrieval over agricultural fields from multi-polarized and multi-angular RADARSAT-2 SAR data. Remote Sensing of Environment. 115(1),  33-43. doi:10.1016/j.rse.2010.07.011

c) Applications of soil moisture products
Powell L.R., A.A. Berg, D.L. Johnson, and J.S. Warland. 2007. ‘Relationships of pest grasshopper populations in Alberta, Canada to soil moisture and climate variables’,  Agricultural and Forest Meteorology. 144, 73-84.

Berg A.A. and K. Mulroy. 2006. Streamflow Predictability in the Saskatchewan/Nelson River Basin Given Macro-Scale Estimates of the Initial Soil Moisture Status. Hydrological Sciences Journal. 51, 642-654.

Post-Doctoral Fellows Supervised

Gordon Drewitt, Nasim Alavi, Tracy Rowlandson, Parinaz Rahimzadeh, Krishna KC

Graduate Students Supervised (since 2005)

Program	Year	Student	Title
Active
Masters		Impera, Sarah	Deriving soil moisture retrievals with the application of passive microwave remote sensing.
Masters		Fuss, Colleen	Increasing digital elevation model resolution using multi-observation, quad-polar, RADARSAT-2 imagery and data fusion techniques.
Masters		McKeown, Steve	Using Synthetic Aperture Radar and optical imagery for detecting tillage and crop residue.
Masters		Melnychuk, Amie	Improving crop classificaton accuracies using a combination of optical imagery and ancillary data sources in a decision tree classifier.
Masters		Roy, Swapan	Role of data simulation in earth sciences.
PhD		Adams, Justin	Integration of Active and Passive Microwave Imagery for Retrievals and Scaling of Soil Moisture.
PhD		Belanger, Jonathon	The role of soil moisture monitoring networks in the validation of remotely sensed soil moisture estimates.
PhD		Manns, Hida	Agricultural influences on soil moisture variability applicable to remote sensing.
Completed
Masters	2011	Powell, Kate	Evaluating soil moisture variability using synthetic aperture radar and terrain indices.
Masters	2011	Rogers, Jess	Retrieval of bare surface parameters using remote sensing.
PhD	2011	Champagne, Catherine	Assessing agricultural drought conditions using remote sensing
Masters	2010	Adams, Justin	Sensitivity of Polarimetric C-band Synthetic Aperture RADAR to Field-Scale Soil Surface Parameters.
PhD	2009	Dumedah, Gift	Multi-Objective Calibration of Hydrological Models and Data Assimilation using Genetic Algorithms.
Masters	2009	Courtney, Lisa	Evaluating the Controls of Soil Moisture Variability within the Canadian Land Surface Scheme (CLASS).
PhD	2008	Alavi, Nasim	Modelling of agricultural water budgets.
Masters	2007	Hansen, Dionne N.	Soil moisture variability at the regional and Satellite Pixel Scale: Implications for Calibration/validation Networks.
Masters	2007	Koukidis, Eleni N.	The sensitivity of the statistical downscaling model (SDSM) to reanalysis products.
Masters	2005	Powell, Luke R.	Links Among Climate, Soil Moisture and Grasshopper Populations in Alberta.