Construction and Management of Automatic Soil Moisture Observation Station Network in Henan Province

doi:10.3969/j.issn.1673-7148.2011.04.015

Abstract：Henan province is the major grain-producing province, however, food production is often affected by drought. To meet the needs of work against drought in the new period, Henan Provincial Meteorological Bureau began to set up automatic soil moisture observation stations in 2009. One hundred and twenty-seven instruments have been installed in crop locations and eleven in fixed locations, covering more than 120 counties from the whole Henan province. The network of a more effective soil moisture and drought monitoring system has formed since 2010. In order to achieve efficient management, timely maintenance of equipment and ensure the automatic soil moisture observation data available, Henan Provincial Meteorological Bureau improves daily station maintenance workflow, strengthens construction of the management department monitoring and technically supporting capacity, increases assessment and manage- ment of the management department, regulates the operational standard for comparative observation and calibration analysis. Currently, service products on soil moisture in Henan province contain distributions of soil moisture content, volume moisture content, relative humidity and the effective storage capacity of water, etc. Automatic observation data have been applied to Agricultural Meteorological Information Weekly, drought service material, frozen soil depth, rainfall penetration depth services and so on.