Testing Soils

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Portable reflectance spectrometer

A portable reflectance spectrometer is disclosed. The spectrometer essentially includes an optical unit and an electronic recording unit. The optical unit includes a pair of thermoelectrically-cooled detectors, for detecting total radiance and selected radiance projected through a circular variable filter wheel, and is capable of operating to provide spectral data in the range 0.4 to 2.5 micrometers without requiring coventional substitution of filter elements. The electronic recording unit includes power supplies, amplifiers, and digital recording electronics designed to permit recordation of data on tape casettes. Both the optical unit and electronic recording unit are packaged to be manually portable

Envisat - taking the measure of North Atlantic storms

Envisat carries a number of sensors able to provide quantitative information on raining clouds: AATSR delivers information on cloud microphysics (particle size, temperature etc.), MWR-2 gives columnar totals for liquid and vapour forms of water, and RA-2 yields rain rate and wind speed. This paper examines the complementarity of these sensors, with a focussed study on significant rain events in the N. Atlantic, covering both coherent large storms and fronts with smaller scale structure. The difference in liquid water estimates from the infra-red and passive systems appears to be related to the temperature and sizes of drops being detected