Moisture probe installed

North East CMA's Embedding Climate Change in Agriculture project is supporting the installation of a moisture probe at Benambra to allow the sharing of soil moisture and temperature information with farmers and soil scientists. Martin Peters from FarmingIT at Meredith has provided the following information and photographs about the installation. This project is supported by North East CMA and Agriculture Victoria with funding from the Australian Government's National Landcare Program.

The probe is 2m away from the pole, perpendicular to the fence. It is trenched in like this:

The shallowest part of the probe is just over 150mm below ground level, with the cable about 200mm below the surface:

The probe has eight soil temperature and eight soil moisture sensors equally spaced along its 800mm length. The first sensor is 200mm below the surface and the deepest is at 900mm.

To track information from the sensor, link to this website to show the updated graphs.

The Soil Moisture Profile graphs show each individual sensor. there is no Y-axis on the graphs because each line is on a different scale. Lines are ordered top to the bottom down the page in the order they go down the profile. This makes it easy to visualise what is going on.

What you can see is the profile slowly drying out from the top down.
The Total Soil Moisture graph is simply all of the individual sensors added together.
The Soil Temperature Profile overlays 4 depths on the same axis.

Over the next 12 months, as there is a complete wetting and drying cycle, there will be a lot more useful information available.