Surface runoff and soil water percolation as affected by snow and soil frost

Abstract

A coupled soil water and heat model was used to study the influence of soil frost and snow on infiltration and drainage flow in an agricultural field in central Sweden. An analogy between freezing/thawing and drying/wetting was assumed for the soil frost submodel. Model simulations were evaluated against measurements of total soil water content, unfrozen water content, soil temperature and drainage water-flow. The influences of soil frost and spatial variation in snow cover were studied by simulation of possible extreme situations in the field. The model accurately described the dynamics of soil temperature and water contents; however, infiltration and field drainage flow were considerably underestimated and delayed by about three weeks under frozen conditions. A model simulation, discounting the effects of soil frost, overestimated the drain response. An attempt at simulating the field variation in snow cover by assuming possible ‘sink points’ for snowmelt, explained part of the deviations between simulated and measured drain flows. A basis for a new model formulation of the infiltration and percolation processes in frozen soil is proposed in which two water-flow domains are assumed, one low-flow domain in the fine pores, smaller than those filled with ice, and one high-flow domain in the large air-filled pores. This allows the simulation of rapid infiltration in large ice-free pores and drainage flow under frozen conditions as well as the resulting redistribution of ice from smaller to larger pores.