Further tests of the HYPROP evaporation method for estimating the unsaturated soil hydraulic properties
Pubblicato online: 06 feb 2018
Pagine: 161 - 169
Ricevuto: 21 lug 2017
Accettato: 11 ago 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/johh-2017-0046
Parole chiave
© 2018 Camila R. Bezerra-Coelho et al., published by De Gruyter Open
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.
Many soil, hydrologic and environmental applications require information about the unsaturated soil hydraulic properties. The evaporation method has long been used for estimating the drying branches of the soil hydraulic functions. An increasingly popular version of the evaporation method is the semi-automated HYPROP© measurement system (HMS) commercialized by Decagon Devices (Pullman, WA) and UMS AG (München, Germany). Several studies were previously carried out to test the HMS methodology by using the Richards equation and the van-Genuchten-Mualem (VG) or Kosugi-Mualem soil hydraulic functions to obtain synthetic data for use in the HMS analysis, and then to compare results against the original hydraulic properties. Using HYDRUS-1D, we carried out independent tests of the HYPROP system as applied to the VG functions for a broad range of soil textures. Our results closely agreed with previous findings. Accurate estimates were especially obtained for the soil water retention curve and its parameters, at least over the range of available retention measurements. We also successfully tested a dual-porosity soil, as well as an extremely coarse medium with a very high van Genuchten