Use of precision farming technologies requires better understanding of soil variability in physical, hydraulic and chemical properties. Some of that variation is natural, some is the result of the management history of the field. So, to match agricultural inputs and practices to site-specific conditions, the factorial kriging algorithm (FKA) was used to analyze spatial variability in some soil ...

Anew computationally efficient directmethod is applied to estimating unsaturated hydraulic properties during steady-state infiltration and evaporation at soil surface. For different soil types with homogeneous and layered heterogeneity, soil hydraulic parameters and unsaturated conductivities are estimated. Unlike the traditional indirect inversion method, the direct method does not require for...

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. ...

To understand the hydraulic properties of soils, accurate prediction of unsaturated hydraulic conductivity is needed which is commonly derived from the soil water release characteristic. In fine-textured soils the modified Mualem-van Genuchten (MMVG) function has been used extensively to predict the change in relative conductivity with changes in matric potential, but this assumes that the soil...

Ecosystem models have difficulty predicting plant drought responses, partially from uncertainty in the stomatal response to water deficits in soil and atmosphere. We evaluate a 'supply-demand' theory for water-limited stomatal behavior that avoids the typical scaffold of empirical response functions. The premise is that canopy water demand is regulated in proportion to threat to supply posed by...

numerical instability can be problems. Therefore, the nonlinear least-squares regression method introduced Tension infiltrometer measurements have been used to measure by Logsdon and Jaynes (1993) has been widely used, steady-state infiltration rates at applied tensions. The measurements owing to its simplicity. They estimated saturated hycan be used to determined soil hydraulic properties thro...

Shallow landslides on steep (>25) hillsides along Puget Sound have resulted in occasional loss of life and costly damage to property during intense or prolonged rainfall. As part of a larger project to assess landslide hazards in the Seattle area, the U.S. Geological Survey instrumented two coastal bluff sites in 2001 to observe the subsurface hydrologic response to rainfall. The instrumentatio...