Simple functions for describing soil water retention and the unsaturated hydraulic conductivity from saturation to complete dryness

Abstract

Many applications require accurate soil hydraulic functions that can describe the dynamics of water in variably saturated systems from full saturation to complete dryness. Current functions considering zero water content at the dry end involve the summation of capillary and adsorption functions. This study proposes relatively simple yet complete soil hydraulic functions from full saturation to oven dryness that can be incorporated into existing models. The proposed water retention model is constructed by scaling the saturation function of Fredlund and Xing (1994) to describe capillary and adsorptive water retention as well as zero water content at oven dryness. To describe the hydraulic conductivity due to capillary and film flow, the model of Wang et al. (2018) is used. We further incorporated hysteresis in the water retention function of Wang et al. (2018). Testing on 241 hydraulic property data sets covering a wide range of soil textures from sands to clays, shows good agreement with laboratory observations, especially for coarse-textured soils. The proposed model accounts for the following processes: hysteretic capillary and adsorptive water retention, hysteretic hydraulic conductivity as a function of pressure head, non-hysteretic hydraulic conductivity as a function of water content, the effects of entrapped air, and closed scanning curves. This paper successfully derives the parameters of the main wetting curve from the main drying curve. Using the proposed functions for soil water flow modelling should lead to improved dynamic flow predictions, especially for drying soil conditions.