Comparison of the Instantaneous Profile Method and inverse modelling for the prediction of effective soil hydraulic properties
Oagile DikinyaDepartment of Environmental Science, The University of Botswana, Private Bag 0022, Gaborone, Botswana. Current address: School of Earth and Geographical Sciences, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia. Email: dikino01@cyllene.uwa.edu.au
Australian Journal of Soil Research 43(5) 599-606 https://doi.org/10.1071/SR04151
Submitted: 19 October 2004 Accepted: 8 March 2005 Published: 8 August 2005
Abstract
Soil hydraulic conductivity K(θ) and soil water retention θ(h) have been determined from a drainage experiment. Two lysimeters, one filled with a sandy soil and the other with a loamy soil, were set up for a 1-dimensional transient flow experiment. The data were collected after flooding the lysimeters with water. Soil water contents were measured by time domain reflectrometry (TDR) and pressure heads were measured by tensiometers with mercury manometers. The experimental data determined by the instantaneous profile method (IPM) were compared with the results obtained by inverse modelling. The inverse modelling proved to be superior to the IPM methodology in effective prediction of hydraulic properties. The measurable properties water content and pressure head were optimised for the following datasets: water content (WC), pressure head (P-h), and a combination of WC and P-h. For both soils the optimisation of the dataset with both WC and P-h resulted in parameters that corresponded closely to the soil hydraulic data generated by the IPM method. The correspondence for the water retention data was better than for the hydraulic conductivity data. The datasets with WC only or P-h only did not contain enough information to accurately estimate the soil hydraulic properties. In most cases the results indicated that the sandy soil gave better agreement than the loamy soil. This was attributed to the faster drainage of the sandy than the loamy soil.
Additional keywords: water retention, hydraulic conductivity, drainage experiment, sandy soil, loamy soil.
Acknowledgments
This work was carried out during my MSc studies at the University of Wageningen, The Netherlands. I would like to thank my MSc project supervisors; Drs C. Dirksen and J. C. van Dam for their guidance and supervision. I am also thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the manuscript.
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