A remaining challenge in hydrology is to explain the observed patterns of hydrological behaviour over multiple spacetime scales as a result of interacting environmental factors. The large spatial and temporal variability of soil water content is determined by factors like atmospheric forcing, topography, soil properties and vegetation, which interact in a complex nonlinear way (e.g. Western et al., 2004).
A promising new technology for environmental monitoring is the wireless sensor network (Cardell-Oliver et al., 2005). The wireless sensor network technology allows the real-time soil water content monitoring at high spatial and temporal resolution for observing hydrological processes in small water-sheds (0.1-80 sqkm). Although wireless sensor networks can still be considered as an emerging research field, the supporting communication technology for low cost, low power wireless networks has matured greatly in the past decade (Robinson et al., 2008). Wireless environmental sensor networks will play an important role in the emerging terrestrial environmental observatories (Bogena et al., 2006), since they are able to bridge the gap between local (e.g. lysimeter) and regional scale measurements (e.g. remote sensing).
This paper presents a first application of the novel wireless soil water content network SoilNet, which was developed at the Forschungszentrum Jülich using the new low-cost ZigBee radio network
