Soil water retention curve (SWRC) and saturated hydraulic conductivity (SHC) are key hydraulic properties for unsaturated zone hydrology and groundwater. In particular, SWRC provides useful information on entry pore-size distribution, and SHC is required for flow and transport modeling in the hydrologic cycle. Not only the SWRC and SHC measurements are time-consuming, but also scale dependent. ...

39 S oil hydraulic parameters are essential input to most hydrologic and climatic models (Mohanty et al., 2002; Mohanty and Zhu, 2007). Th ey are used to defi ne the hydraulic characteristics of the soil vital in modeling soil moisture and fl ux in the unsaturated zone near the land–atmosphere boundary. At the scale of model applications, it is very important to defi ne the appropriate paramete...

As part of a larger, collaborative study, we conducted field experiments to investigate how rainfall signals propagate through an unsaturated soil profile, leading to a rapid pore pressure response and slope instability. We sprinkler-irrigated an entire, unchanneled headwater basin in the steep, humid Oregon Coast Range, and we drove the system to quasi steady state as indicated by tensiometers...

[1] Simultaneous scaling of soil water retention and hydraulic conductivity functions provides an effective means to characterize the heterogeneity and spatial variability of soil hydraulic properties in a given study area. The statistical significance of this approach largely depends on the number of soil samples collected. Unfortunately, direct measurement of the soil hydraulic functions is t...

seepage analysis through earth dams is employed to determine the water loss. moreover, as the magnitude of pore pressure in dam body is calculated using seepage analysis, this analysis plays an important role on the stability analysis in these types of structures. as the hydraulic conductivity of the earth dam materials, is considered as one of the effective parameters on the magnitude of seepa...

Numerical simulation of flow through multidimensional heterogeneous soils under unsaturated conditions is a computationally intensive task. The governing unsaturated flow equation is nonlinear. The degree of nonlinearity depends on the unsaturated hydraulic properties of the soil and the degree of heterogeneity. In this paper, we present a highly efficient method to simulate unsaturated steady ...

shrublands (Elkins et al., 1986; Lyford and Qashu, 1969; Wainwright et al., 2000), mesquite rangelands (Wood In semiarid environments, vegetation affects surface runoff either and Blackburn, 1981), and piñon-juniper rangelands in by altering surface characteristics (e.g., surface roughness, litter absorption) or subsurface characteristics (e.g., hydraulic conductivity). the USA (Roundy et al., ...

Critical path analysis and percolation theory are known to predict accurately dc and low frequency ac electrical conductivity in strongly heterogeneous solids, and have some applications in statistics. Much of this work is dedicated to review the current state of these theories. Application to heterogeneous porous media has been slower, though the concept of percolation was invented in that con...

[1] Prediction of flow through variably saturated porous media requires accurate knowledge of the soil hydraulic properties, namely the water retention function (WRF) and the hydraulic conductivity function (HCF). Unfortunately, direct measurement of the HCF is time consuming and expensive. In this study, we derive a simple closed-form equation that predicts the saturated hydraulic conductivity...