Abstract
A family of soil water potential curves, nearly continuous with time, is necessary to calculate soil water movement in the soil profile. Frequent personal reading to obtain such curves is both time consuming and costly. A system is described that automatically measures soil water potential in a soil-root environment in rhizotron studies. The system utilizes automatically operated fluid switch wafers that are capable of switching as many as 24 tensiometers to a single pressure transducer for measurement. The transducer is sufficiently sensitive to measure differences as small as 0.003 bar easily. With frequent automatic readings and tensiometers placed at various soil depths, the data are recorded on magnetic tape by a data-acquisition system from which they go to a plotter where an essentially continuous water potential curve of a soil profile is obtained.
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