The 1 st National Conference on Science, Engineering and Technology (REDSET 2014), 17-18 October 2014, Gurgaon India Building a Prototype Real-time Soil Moisture Monitoring and Forecasting System Dr. Sudipta K. Mishra Assistant Professor Department of Civil & Mechanical Engineering School of Engineering, GD Goenka University, Gurgaon India Dr. Sandeep Nagar Assistant Professor Department of Electrical & Electronics Engineering School of Engineering, GD Goenka University, Gurgaon India Mr. Ramandeep Singh Assistant Professor Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering School of Engineering, GD Goenka University, Gurgaon India Abstract: Soil moisture, which broadly describes wetness or amount of moisture in a certain volume of soil, is an important climatic variable that controls many hydrologic processes e.g. rainfall runoff processes, land atmospheric interaction etc. Measuring soil moisture potentially throws many important advantages in our daily life e.g. it helps farmer to save water and increase crop yield. Soil moisture monitoring system (SMMFS), envisioned through this project at GD Goenka University, will perform: sense soil moisture in the sampling points, read and store the soil moisture data over certain time (do averaging and data filtering), transmit the processed data to a server through wireless nodes, do spatial interpolation, visualization and interpretation of the sampled data. Soil moisture sensors are based on a variety of physical phenomenon and there are many advantages if the soil moisture sensors are connected with a wireless data transfer e.g. data can be transferred to a server for visualization in real or near real time. In this project, data loggers will collect, stores soil moisture data and transfer in real- time to a computer server. Then it will use geo statistical models to convert point source data to data over certain spatial domain. The approach can be explained as: (i) fit point source data in some time series model e.g. ARIMA, (ii) find out geo statistical kernel function to fir point data spatially, and (ii) Finally use the spatial function and merge with the ARIMA model and predict SM at certain grid points. SWMFS system build through this project will be linked to an irrigation network in future, Intelligent Irrigation System (IIS), which will help in providing optimal moisture content for crops in a particular area. Keywords: Soil moisture probe, Wireless communication, Soil moisture modelling and forecasting I. INTRODUCTION Soil moisture is an important climatic variable that controls many hydrologic processes e.g. rainfall runoff processes, land atmospheric interaction etc. It influences food productivity and hence acts as an important agricultural variable for food security also. Soil moisture broadly describes wetness or amount of moisture in a certain volume of soil sample. There are many ways to denotes soil moisture in soil e.g. (i) Gravitational soil water content (SWC) which signifies amount of water (in weight basis) in the soil; (ii) Volumetric soil water content is calculated by multiplying SWC with soil bulk density; and (iii) soil water potential denotes the amount of energy required to extract water from a dry soil sample. Measuring soil moisture potentially throws many important advantages in our daily life e.g. it helps farmer to save water and increase crop yield. Often excess irrigation does increase cost of agricultural production and can bring negative effects to the environment in terms of excess runoff or waterlogging. Moreover it intensifies the problem of pollutant release to the streams or groundwater and washes off good amount of the fertilizer applied in the field vies-a-vies reduce crop productivity. Monitoring soil moisture have many important applications in different areas including: Bioremediation, Wastewater Reclamation, Landfill Management and Agriculture. We as an interdisciplinary team at GD Goenka University, with the help of some student members, have started a project to build a real time soil moisture monitoring system in the campus. The project includes: (i) designing and developing a soil moisture probe, (ii) recording and transferring soil moisture data to a server wirelessly, (iii) profiling,