Monitoring rainfall intensity and moisture water content using soil column experiment

Abstract

Indonesia is a tropical country that has two seasons, rainy season and dry season. The wetting and drying of soil due to changing of the seasons caused change on soil properties such as moisture soil water content, effective soil porosity, soil suction etc. During rainy season, rainfall infiltration caused increasing of moisture soil water content in a soil slope, tends to reduce soil shear strength and followed by slope instability. In this soil column experiment was set up with rain gauge station and YL-69 sensor and capacitive soil moisture sensor to monitor rainfall infiltration and soil moisture water content in red clay soil. A wireless sensor network with low power wide area network technology integrated with the cloud to observe rainfall intensity and soil water content in soil column with realtime monitoring. The focused on improving the accuracy of rainfall intensity and soil water content sensors readings using regression methods. The experiment results showed that rainfall intensity was observed accurately while for the YL-69 sensor, the error reading was 5.15% and the error reading capacitive soil moisture sensor was 2.99%.