John Norman

University of Wisconsin–Madison | UW · Department of Soil Science

Thermal infrared (TIR) remote sensing of the land-surface temperature (LST) provides an invaluable diagnostic of surface fluxes and vegetation state, from plant and sub-field scales up to regional and global coverage. However, without proper consideration of the nuances of the remotely sensed LST signal, TIR imaging can give poor results for estima...

In this chapter, we describe research for understanding how living systems function in the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum (SPAC). Through process-based modeling and earth observations it is evident that whole ecosystems function as living entities. Process-based models and observations at the cellular to plant canopy level of water, energy and car...

Plant canopy interception of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) drives carbon dioxide (CO2), water and energy cycling in the soil-plant-atmosphere system. Quantifying intercepted PAR requires accurate measurements of total incident PAR above canopies and direct beam and diffuse PAR components. While some regional data sets include these data...

The utility of a snow–vegetation energy balance model for estimating surface energy fluxes is evaluated with field measurements at two sites in a rangeland ecosystem in southwestern Idaho during the winter of 2007: one site dominated by aspen vegetation and the other by sagebrush. Model parameterizations are adopted from the two source energy balan...

Many studies have evaluated nitrate-N leaching from tile-drained agricultural soils, but little longterm research has been performed on well-drained soils commonly throughout the Midwest. Equilibrium tension lysimeters installed at a depth of 1.4 m were used to measure year-round (12 month) nitrate-N leaching below chisel-plow (CP) and no-tillage (...

Prognostic Soil-Plant-Atmosphere (S-P-A) system models should be made as robust as possible; that is, parameters should be independent of variables and constant during applications with similar initial conditions (no calibration). However, avoiding calibration requires more cooperation among neighboring disciplines with a commensurate increase in t...

Pedotransfer functions (PTFs) can be used to estimate saturated hydraulic conductivity (K-s) from soil properties such as texture and bulk density. We evaluated several published PTFs to determine which was the most reliable for predicting maximum soil infiltration rates for soils in Dane County, Wisconsin. The PTFs were evaluated with a local data...

Optimization techniques are used extensively for strategic and operations planning in a large number of system engineering applications. In the dairy farm industry, though development is of great interest and importance, analyzing and quantifying the benefits of manure separation can be a challenging task, usually because of the complex interacting...

Science is a powerful human endeavor for exploring the unknown; it includes a dynamic balance between the stabilizing influence of intellectual inertia and the destabilizing role of innovation and creativity. The term “intellectual inertia”, which is used but rarely defined, is explored and some historical examples of its formidable influence on th...

Sustaining Soil Productivity in Response to Global Climate Change:Science, Policy, and Ethicsis a multi-disciplinary volume exploring the ethical, political and social issues surrounding the stewardship of our vital soil resources. Based on topics presented by an international group of experts at a conference convened through support of the Organiz...

Thermal infrared (TIR) remote sensing of land-surface temperature (LST) provides valuable information about the sub-surface moisture status required for estimating evapotranspiration (ET) and detecting the onset and severity of drought. While empirical indices measuring anomalies in LST and vegetation amount (e.g., as quantified by the Normalized D...

Equilibrium tension lysimeters are useful tools for monitoring soil water and solute fluxes. The potential residual effects of lysimeter installation procedures are unknown, however. During summer 2006, 12 lysimeters were excavated aft er long-term installation, and soil deformations above the lysimeters and installation materials were observed and...

Thermal infrared (TIR) remote sensing of land-surface temperature (LST) provides valuable information about the sub-surface moisture status required for estimating evapotranspiration (ET) and detecting the onset and severity of drought. While empirical indices measuring anomalies in LST and vegetation amount (e.g., as quantified by the Normalized D...

The Priestley-Taylor (PT) approximation for computing evapotranspiration was initially developed for conditions of a horizontally uniform saturated surface sufficiently extended to obviate any significant advection of energy. Nevertheless, the PT approach has been effectively implemented within the framework of a thermal-based two-source model (TSM...

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Biophysical models intended for routine applications at a range of scales should attempt to balance the competing demands of generality and simplicity and be capable of realistically simulating the response of CO₂ and energy fluxes to environmental and physiological forcings. At the same time they must remain computationally inexpensive and suffici...

Decreased water uptake closes stomates, which reduces transpiration and increases leaf temperature. The leaf or canopy temperature has long been used to make an empirical estimate of plant water stress. However, with a few supplemental measurements and application of biophysical principles, infrared measurement of canopy temperature can be used to...

Empirical temperature models are commonly used to estimate N release from polymer-coated control led-release fertilizers (CRFs) under field conditions where the influence of soil moisture is negligible. For surface-applied CRF in bare-root nurseries, the effect of sod moisture may be important. To quantify the effect of soil moisture on N release f...

After decades of research into the subject, preferential flow in soils still plagues those of us who hope to provide better solutions to society's natural resource management conundrums. To that end, simulation models that strike the balance between simplicity and robustness are a high priority. We present the two-domain, Mesopore and Matrix (M&M),...

Research was conducted in 1998 and 1999 to characterize common lambsquarters photosynthesis and seed production as influenced by biotic (crop environment) and abiotic (climate) factors. Treatments were common lambsquarters in soybean, in corn, and in common lambsquarters monoculture. Common lambsquarters net photosynthesis was variable among treatm...

Prescribed burning recycles essential plant nutrients and stimulates growth in prairie restoration. While reducing the content of nutrients in dry matter, prescribed burning may also alter the spatial variability and distribution of nutrients, which in turn could negatively impact long-term productivity. A study was conducted in a tallgrass prairie...

Assessments of ecosystem restorations are necessary to improve restoration practices and goals. Restoration assessments, whether quantitative or qualitative, are also a vital part of managing previously degraded ecosystems. This study examined some of the key structural and functional characteristics and processes of a tallgrass prairie restoration...

Robust yet simple remote sensing methodologies for mapping instantaneous land-surface fluxes of water, energy and CO2 exchange within a coupled framework add significant value to large-scale monitoring networks like FLUXNET, facilitating upscaling of tower flux observations to address questions of regional carbon cycling and water availability. Thi...

This study was conducted to evaluate the overall performance of the Precision Agricultural-Landscape Modeling System (PALMS) for calculating runoff and soil loss under cropped conditions. The PALMS model uses a lognormal distribution of saturated hydraulic conductivity across the fields to simulate typical soil heterogeneity within soil texture cla...

  The summertime heating of runoff in urban areas is recognized as a common and consistent urban climatological phenomenon. In this study, a simple thermal urban runoff model (TURM) is presented for the net energy flux at the impervious surfaces of urban areas to account for the heat transferred to runoff. The first step in developing TURM consists...

Background/Question/Methods The amount of water in the soil that is available for plants to use depends on many factors: Precipitation amount and intensity, soil hydraulic properties that affect runoff and drainage, plant shoot and root distribution, soil surface sealing and crusting properties, slope characteristics, and land management practice...

Impervious surfaces absorb and store energy from the sun. During a rainfall/runoff event, some of that energy is transferred to the runoff as it flows over heated impervious surfaces. High-temperature runoff can be detrimental to cold-water habitat as it enters receiving waters; therefore, structures to cool this heated runoff water are desirable....

Limited comparisons of sediment and phosphorus (P) loss dynamics from agricultural fields under snowmelt and rainfall runoff conditions exist despite significant differences in underlying particle detachment and transport processes during these two periods. A systems approach was used on three hydrologically isolated hillslope tracts from which rai...

Soil erosion from agricultural lands and the subsequent transport of sediment and sediment-bound nutrients (particularly P) are serious problems contributing to surface water pollution and threatening agricultural sustainability. Raindrop impact on bare soil destabilizes soil aggregates and leads to surface sealing, increasing runoff volumes and so...

Two of the most important limitations when predicting soil movement are the natural complexity and the spatial heterogeneity of the processes. Sod erosion can vary significantly across short distances as a function of local soil properties and microtopography; but regardless of this, many erosion models assume homogeneity in topography and soil cha...

A precision scale landscape model designed for agricultural applications is described in this paper. The Precision Agricultural Landscape Modeling System (PALMS) is a combination of two process-based models: a diffusive wave runoff model with ponding (described in detail) and a biosphere model with a crops module (briefly reviewed). Several innovat...

Robust satellite-derived moisture stress indices will be beneficial to operational drought monitoring, both in the United States and globally. Using thermal infrared imagery from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) and vegetation information from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS), a fully automated inver...

Due to the influence of evaporation on land-surface temperature, thermal remote sensing data provide valuable information regarding the surface moisture status. The Atmosphere-Land Exchange Inverse (ALEXI) model uses the morning surface temperature rise, as measured from a geostationary satellite platform, to deduce surface energy and water fluxes...

In many land-surface models using bulk transfer (one-source) approaches, the application of radiometric surface temperature observations in energy flux computations has given mixed results. This is due in part to the non-unique relationship between the so-called aerodynamic temperature, which relates to the efficiency of heat exchange between the l...

A number of recent intensive and extended field campaigns have been devoted to the collection of land-surface fluxes from a variety of platforms, with the purpose of inferring the long-term C, water, and energy budgets across large areas (watershed, continental, or global scales). One approach to flux upscaling is to use land-atmosphere transfer sc...

Plant canopy radiation-use efficiency (RUE), defined as unit or dry biomass produced per unit of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (APAR), has been widely studied both in experimental and theoretical contexts because the use of this relationship greatly simplifies estimating biomass production in plant growth models. Previous studies hav...

An effective flux-scaling scheme must be able to bridge the gap between the field scale of interest to agricultural and resource managers (~100 m) and the regional scale (~10-100 km), the resolutions used by operational climate and weather forecast models. An approach with operational capabilities is described, which employs a flux disaggregation s...

Both one-source and two-source parameterizations of surface sensible heat flux exchange using radiometric surface temperature have been proposed. Although one-source algorithms may provide reliable heat fluxes, they often require field calibration and hence are unable to accommodate the diverse range of surface conditions often encountered over a l...

Uncertainties in assessing the effects of global-scale perturbations on the climate system arise primarily from an inadequate understanding of the hydrological cycle: on land, in oceans, and in the atmosphere and biosphere. Because of this uncertainty, almost all science-based initiatives have expressed the need for continued advances in global obs...

This article presents a study of residential parcel design and surface heat island formation in a major metropolitan region of the southeastern United States. Through the integration of high-resolution multispectral data (10m) with property tax records for over 100,000 single-family residential parcels in the Atlanta, Georgia, metropolitan region,...

In the application of radiometric surface temperature observations for heat flux computations in numerical models, it is necessary to consider differences between the so-called "aerodynamic" temperature, which is the model-derived temperature that relates to the efficiency of heat exchange between the land surface and overlying atmosphere, and a "s...

Robust, operational methodologies for mapping daily evapotranspiration (ET), soil moisture, and moisture stress over large areas using remote sensing will have widespread utility in a variety of resource management and forecasting applications. Here we examine the utility a regional surface energy balance system -" the Atmosphere-Land Exchange Inve...

This work describes a simple, passive sampling system for measuring runoff, sediment, and chemical losses from typical agricultural fields. The sampler consists of a 5 to 7 m wide runoff collector connected to a series of multislot divisors. These divisors split the flow into aliquots, providing a continuous sampling during the runoff event. Diviso...

The effects of nonrandom leaf area distributions on surface flux predictions from a two-source thermal remote sensing model are investigated. The modeling framework is applied at local and regional scales over the Soil Moisture-Atmosphere Coupling Experiment (SMACEX) study area in central Iowa, an agricultural landscape that exhibits foliage organi...

A precision scale landscape model designed for agricultural applications is described in this paper. The Precision Agricultural Landscape Modeling System (PALMS) is a combination of two process-based models: a diffusive wave runoff model with ponding (described in detail) and a biosphere model with a crops module (briefly reviewed). Several innovat...

Ecosystem models are routinely used to estimate net primary production (NPP) from the stand to global scales. Complex ecosystem models, implemented at small scales (< 10 km2), are impractical at global scales and, therefore, require simplifying logic based on key ecological first principles and model drivers derived from remotely sensed data. There...

The Atmosphere-Land Exchange Inverse (ALEXI) model was designed for routine monitoring of surface water, energy, and carbon fluxes at continental scales based on thermal imagery from a geostationary satellite platform. Operational processing of fluxes over the continental U.S. at 10-km resolution commenced in 2002; to date, three consecutive years...

Plant foliage density expressed as leaf area index (LAI) is an important parameter that is widely used in many ecological, meteorological and agronomic models. LAI retrieval using optical remote sensing usually requires the collection of surface calibration values or the use of image information to invert radiative transfer models. A comparison of...

Microwave-based remote sensing algorithms for mapping soil moisture are sensitive to water contained in surface vegetation at moderate levels of canopy cover. Correction schemes require spatially distributed estimates of vegetation water content at scales comparable to that of the microwave sensor footprint (101 to 104 m). This study compares the r...

Plant foliage density expressed as leaf area index (LAI) is used in many ecological, meteorological, and agronomic models, and as a means of quantifying crop spatial variability for precision farming. LAI retrieval using spectral vegetation indices (SVI) from optical remotely sensed data usually requires site-specific calibration values from the su...

Fertilizers and liming agents are generally used to achieve optimal economic yields. However, several negative effects of long-term annual fertilization of nitrogen (N) in particular have been observed, such as reduced cation exchange capacity and decreased base saturation, which may stimulate accelerated leaching loss of other nutrients. Equilibri...

Light use efficiency (LUE) models are often used with remotely sensed data products to estimate net primary production (NPP) from local to global scales. However, data on the variability of the LUE coefficient, ɛ, on the landscape are minimal and sometimes conflicting. The objectives of this study were to (1) quantify and compare the variability of...

In this first part of a two-part investigation, large-scale Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) analyses over the Amazônia region have been carried out for March and October of 1999 to provide detailed information on surface radiation budget (SRB) and precipitation variability. SRB fluxes and rainfall are the two foremost cloud...

Evaluating the impact of land use practices on ground water quality has been difficult because few techniques are capable of monitoring the quality and quantity of soil water flow below the root zone without disturbing the soil profile and affecting natural flow processes. A recently introduced method, known as equilibrium tension lysimetry, was a...

Disaggregation of regional-scale (10 3 m) flux estimates to micrometeorological scales (10 1 –10 2 m) facilitates direct comparison between land surface models and ground-based observations. Inversely, it also provides a means for upscaling flux-tower information into a regional context. The utility of the Atmosphere–Land Exchange Inverse (ALEXI) m...

An artificial flux generation device was developed to test the accuracy of a closed-dynamic soil respiration system (LICOR 6400). The device consisted of an enclosed reservoir with a porous top; the reservoir contained a volume of CO2 enriched air, which was monitored by an infrared gas analyzer (IRGA). When the internal CO2 concentration within th...

Accurate maps of various key soil properties on fine spatial resolutions play an important role in precision modeling of agricultural systems. Recent development of alternatives to soil coring enables us to collect multiple sources of data, but data quality and spatial resolutions may differ greatly from one source to another. In this article, we u...

Since the advent of the meteorological satellite, a large research effort within the community of earth scientists has been directed at assessing the components of the land surface energy balance from space. The development of these techniques from first efforts to the present time are reviewed, and the integrated system used to estimate the radiat...

Disaggregation of regional-scale (103 m) flux estimates to micrometeorological scales (101-102 m) facilitates direct comparison between land-surface models and ground-based observations. Inversely, it also provides a means for upscaling flux tower information into a regional context. The utility of the Atmosphere Land-Exchange Inverse (ALEXI) model...

The strength of interaction among Soil, plants, and atmosphere depends highly on scale. As the spatial scale of organized soil-plant behavior (e.g., soil drying and/or stomatal closure) increases, so does the influence the land surface has on atmospheric properties and circulations. Counterbalancing this is a system of feedback loops that serve to...

The strength of interaction among soil, plants, and atmosphere depends highly on scale. As the spatial scale of organized soil-plant behavior (e.g., soil drying and/or stomatal closure) increases, so does the influence the land surface has on atmospheric properties and circulations. Counterbalancing this is a system of feedback loops that serve to...

Quantifying forest net primary production (NPP) is critical to understanding the global carbon cycle because forests are responsible for a large portion of the total terrestrial NPP. The objectives of this study were to measure aboveground NPP (NPPA) for a land surface in northern Wisconsin, examine the spatial patterns of NPPA and its components,...

Accurate surface temperature retrieval using thermal infrared observations from satellites is important for surface energy balance modeling; however it is difficult to achieve without proper correction for atmospheric effects. Typically the atmospheric correction is obtained from radiosonde profiles and a radiative transfer model (RTM). But rigorou...

Many applications exist within the fields of agriculture, forestry, land management, and hydrologic assessment for routine estimation of surface energy fluxes, particularly evapotranspiration (ET), at spatial resolutions of the order of 101 m. A new two-step approach (called the disaggregated atmosphere land exchange inverse model, or DisALEXI) has...

Interpretation of elemental balances requires careful assessment of component terms and their errors, especially for the major terms of the nitrogen (N) budget which has implications for environmental health. This study reports results from independent field measurements of major annual N-budget components, including atmospheric deposition, fertili...

Routine (i.e., daily to weekly) monitoring of surface energy fluxes, particularly evapotranspiration (ET), using satellite observations of radiometric surface temperature has not been feasible at high pixel resolution (i.e., ∼101–102 m) because of the low frequency in satellite coverage over the region of interest (i.e., approximately every 2 weeks...

The objective of this study was to compare the carbon (C) budgets of two similar-aged boreal black spruce (Picea mariana [Mill.] BSP) forest communities: closed-canopy black spruce with feathermoss ground cover (BSFM) on moderately drained soils and open-canopy black spruce with Sphagnum ground cover (BSSP) on poorly drained soils. C content, soil...

One of the first ordinances in the Nation to protect cold-water streams from heated runoff is serving as a model for other urbanizing communities. Dane County, Wisconsin has developed a locator tool and tested a new thermal urban runoff model in answer to the ordinance.

Nitrogen (N) mineralization is a spatially variable and difficult component of the N cycle to quantify accurately under field conditions. Net N-mineralization was compared by direct measurement, indirect estimate, and laboratory incubation for a restored tallgrass prairie and for deficiently and optimally N-fertilized, no-tillage (NT) and chisel-pl...

The variability of crop yield in dryland production is primarily affected by the spatial distribution of plant-available water even for seemingly uniform fields. The most productive midwestern soils, which are loess caps over glacial till or outwash, can have a wide range of water-holding capacities in individual fields because of landscape process...

The variability of crop yield in dryland production is primarily affected by the spatial distribution of plant‐available water even for seemingly uniform fields. The most productive midwestern soils, which are loess caps over glacial till or outwash, can have a wide range of water‐holding capacities in individual fields because of landscape process...

The suitability of using K-theory to describe turbulent transfer within plant canopies was evaluated with field measurements and simulations of a detailed soil–plant–atmosphere model (Cupid). Simulated results with both K-theory and an analytical Lagrangian theory (L-theory) implemented in Cupid were evaluated against Bowen-ratio energy balance mea...

Black spruce (Picea mariana [Mill.] BSP) is the most dominant forest ecosystem in the North American boreal region. There are at least two contrasting boreal black spruce forest communities: open-canopy black spruce overstory with Sphagnum ground cover (BSSP) and closed-canopy black spruce overstory with feathermoss ground cover (BSFM). The objecti...

In this paper, we present a Thermal Urban Runoff Model (TURM) developed by the Dane County Land Conservation Department and the University of Wisconsin-Madison to predict the effect of urban development on runoff thermal regime. The model can predict the temperature increase of runoff from impervious surface by calculating the heat transfer between...