Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

Soils are warming and drying in mid-May

After a cooling spell last weekend, soil temperatures are once again rising in Illinois, according to Jennie Atkins, Water and Atmospheric Resources Monitoring Program manager at the Illinois State Water Survey, part of the Prairie Research Institute at Illinois.

Soil temperatures at depths of 4 inches under bare soil have risen 5 degrees from May 1 to a state average of 65 degrees on May 15. Temperatures were running 4 degrees below average but are right at the long-term average for mid-May.

Cooler weather at the end of the second week of the month caused soils temperatures to fall into the 40s and 50s, but air temperatureshave risen this week to daily highs from the 60s to the low 80s. 

Soils remain moist but are drying. Moisture levels at 2 inches averaged 0.42 water fraction by volume across Illinois on May 15, 31% higher than the long-term average and 56% higher than in 2018. On average, levels have decreased 6 percent since May 1. All regions except the south have seen drying.

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Engineering Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Nishant Garg, center, is joined by fellow researchers, from left: Yujia Min, Hossein Kabir, Nishant Garg, center, Chirayu Kothari and M. Farjad Iqbal, front right. In front are examples of clay samples dissolved at different concentrations in a NaOH solution. The team invented a new test that can predict the performance of cementitious materials in mere 5 minutes. This is in contrast to the standard ASTM tests, which take up to 28 days. This new advance enables real-time quality control at production plants of emerging, sustainable materials. Photo taken at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025. (Photo by Fred Zwicky / University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Researchers develop a five-minute quality test for sustainable cement industry materials

A new test developed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign can predict the performance of a new type of cementitious construction material in five minutes — a significant improvement over the current industry standard method, which takes seven or more days to complete. This development is poised to advance the use of next-generation resources called supplementary cementitious materials — or SCMs — by speeding up the quality-check process before leaving the production floor.

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