Welcome to Cosmic Sense

Cosmic Sense is a research unit funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG), grant no. FOR 2694. After a successful first phase, the second phase kicked off in spring 2022 for another three years.

The core approach of the research unit is advancing of the Cosmic Ray Neutron Sensing (CRNS) technology and its application together with other methods, as an innovative approach to measuring soil moisture at the scale of hundreds of meters and beyond. This scale perfectly matches the need for soil moisture assessment at the landscape scale, e.g. for small catchments, and is also an important link between point-scale soil moisture measurements and large-scale maps obtained from remote sensing or hydrological modelling. It is therefore, a highly attractive tool for both, scientific research and applied water management.

Cosmic Sense brings together scientists from nine institutes and universities from Germany and Austria, joining forces in order to advance the technology itself and develop a quantitative, adaptable, and transferable approach for observing root-zone soil moisture at the field scale while accounting for other dynamic water pools, such as biomass. In phase 2, special emphasis will be on including snow as an additional dynamic water pool in the landscape, agricultural land use such as cropped fields, and a shift towards larger scales (10 – 100 km²).

Find out more about the project, its members and latest activities!