Application of spreadsheet to estimate infiltration parameters

Abstract

Summary Infiltration is the process of flow of water into the ground through the soil surface. Soil water although contributes a negligible fraction of total water present on earth surface, but is of utmost importance for plant life. Estimation of infiltration rates is of paramount importance for estimation of effective rainfall, groundwater recharge, and designing of irrigation systems. Numerous infiltration models are in use for estimation of infiltration rates. The conventional graphical approach for estimation of infiltration parameters often fails to estimate the infiltration parameters precisely. The generalised reduced gradient (GRG) solver is reported to be a powerful tool for estimating parameters of nonlinear equations and it has, therefore, been implemented to estimate the infiltration parameters in the present paper. Field data of infiltration rate available in literature for sandy loam soils of Umuahia, Nigeria were used to evaluate the performance of GRG solver. A comparative study of graphical method and GRG solver shows that the performance of GRG solver is better than that of conventional graphical method for estimation of infiltration rates. Further, the performance of Kostiakov model has been found to be better than the Horton and Philip's model in most of the cases based on both the approaches of parameter estimation.