Field test of two background temperature correction methods of dual probe heat pulse method

Abstract

Dual probe heat pulse (DPHP) method is a useful method to measure many soil physical properties in-situ, which play important roles in soil science, meteorology, hydrology and so on. It is essential to remove the effect of background temperature fluctuations for DPHP estimations. We compared two background temperature correction methods of DPHP method, linear trend method (LTM) and reference temperature method (RTM) in field experiments. We found that misused LTM lead to large errors in DPHP estimations with shallow burial depth. When the burial depth of temperature probe (d) of DPHP sensor is <14 mm, background temperature changes are related to environmental factors such as solar radiation and wind, and RTM can decrease the relative error (RE) in thermal conductivity (λ) from 667% to 68%. Besides, our results also showed during the period from 9:00 to 16:00, the RTM method is valuable for getting accurate DPHP estimations with the 2 mm burial depth. After replacing LTM by RTM, REs were decreased to (6 ± 28)% from (17 ± 87) % in λ, and were decreased to (9 ± 17)% from (10 ± 18)% in volumetric heat capacity (Cv). But RTM is also affected by other factors such as the spatially heterogeneous temperature distribution of tested sample and should be taken into account in the further studies.