Calculation of soil water content using dielectric-permittivity-based sensors – benefits of soil-specific calibration

Abstract. Soil water content (SWC) sensors are widely used for scientific studies or for the management of agricultural practices. The most common sensing techniques provide an estimate of volumetric soil water content based on sensing of dielectric permittivity. These techniques include frequency domain reflectometry (FDR), time domain reflectometry (TDR), capacitance and even remote-sensing techniques such as ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and microwave-based techniques. Here, we will focus on frequency domain reflectometry (FDR) sensors and more specifically on the questioning of their factory calibration, which does not take into account soil-specific features and therefore possibly leads to inconsistent SWC estimates. We conducted the present study in the southwest of France on two plots that are part of the ICOS ERIC network (Integrated Carbon Observation System, European Research and Infrastructure Consortium), FR-Lam and FR-Aur. We propose a simple protocol for soil-specific calibration, particularly suitable for clayey soil, to improve the accuracy of SWC determination when using commercial FDR sensors. We compared the sensing accuracy after soil-specific calibration versus factory calibration. Our results stress the necessity of performing a thorough soil-specific calibration for very clayey soils. Hence, locally, we found that factory calibration results in a strong overestimation of the actual soil water content. Indeed, we report relative errors as large as +115 % with a factory-calibrated sensor based on the real part of dielectric permittivity and up to + 245 % with a factory-calibrated sensor based on the modulus of dielectric permittivity.