Improving Calibration and Validation of Cosmic-Ray NeutronSensors in the Light of Spatial Sensitivity – Theory and Evidence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. In the last years the method of cosmic-ray neutron sensing (CRNS) has gained popularity among soil hydrologists, physicists, and land-surface modelers. The sensor provides continuous soil moisture data, averaged over several hectares and tens of decimeters depth. However, the signal still may contain unidentified features of hydrological processes, and many calibration datasets are often required in order to find reliable relations between neutrons and water dynamics. Recent insights into environmental neutrons accurately described the spatial sensitivity of the sensor and thus allowed to quantify the contribution of individual sample locations to the CRNS signal. Consequently, data points of calibration and validation datasets are suggested to be averaged using a more physically-based weighting approach. In this work, a revised sensitivity function is used to calculate weighted averages of point data. The approach is extensively tested with two calibration and four time series datasets from a variety of sites and conditions. In all cases, the revised averaging method robustly improved the performance of the CRNS product and even helped to reveal otherwise hidden hydrological processes. The presented approach increases the overall accuracy of CRNS products and will have impact on all their applications in agriculture, hydrology, and modeling.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".