A bimodal extension of the ARYA&PARIS approach for predicting hydraulic properties of structured soils

Abstract

• Bimodal Arya&Paris hydraulic properties were developed based on soil structure. • The bimodal PTF provides better prediction of un/saturated hydraulic conductivity. • The bimodal PTF predicts well the spatial variability of the hydraulic properties. The main purpose of this paper is to develop a bimodal pedotransfer function to obtain soil water retention (WRC) and hydraulic conductivity (HCC) curves. The proposed pedo-transfer function (PTF) extends the Arya and Paris (AP) approach, which is based on particle size distribution (PSD), by incorporating aggregate-size distribution (ASD) into the PTF to obtain the bimodal WRC. A bimodal porosity approach was developed to quantify the fraction of each of the porous systems (matrix and macropores) in overall soil porosity. Saturated hydraulic conductivity, K 0 , was obtained from WRC using the Kozeny-Carman equation, whose parameters were inferred from the behaviour of the bimodal WRC close to saturation. Finally, the Mualem model was applied to obtain the HCC. In order to calibrate the PTF, measured soil physical and hydraulic properties data were used, coming from field infiltration experiments from an irrigation sector of 140 ha area in the “Sinistra Ofanto” irrigation system in Apulia, southern Italy. The infiltration data were fitted by using both bimodal and unimodal hydraulic properties by an inverse solution of the Richards equation. The bimodal “measured” hydraulic properties were then used to calibrate the scaling parameter (α AP ) of the proposed bimodal AP ( bimAP ) PTF. Similarly, for the sake of comparison with the bimodal results, the unimodal hydraulic properties were used to calibrate the α AP of the classical unimodal AP ( unimAP ) PTF. Compared to the unimAP PTF, the proposed bimAP significantly improves the predictions of the mean WRC parameters and K 0 , as well as the prediction of the shape of the whole HCC. Moreover, compared to the unimodal approach, it also allows to reproduce statistics of the hydraulic parameters (for example, variance) similar to those observed in the calibration dataset. Multiple linear regression (MLR) was also applied to analyse the sensitivity of the bimodal α AP parameter to textural and structural features, confirming significant predictive effects of soil structure.