Surfactants are chemical compounds that can change the contact angle of a water drop on solid surfaces and are commonly used to increase infiltration into water repellent soil. Since production fields with water repellent soil often contain areas of wettable soil, surfactants applied to such fields worldwide will likely be applied to wettable soil, with unknown consequences for irrigation-induc...

TOPMODEL rainfall-runoff hydrologic concepts are based on soil saturation processes, where soil controls on hydrograph recession have been represented by linear, exponential, and power function decay with soil depth. Although these decay formulations have been incorporated into baseflow decay and topographic index computations, only the linear and exponential forms have been incorporated into i...

[1] One potential consequence of global climate change and rapid changes in land use is an increased risk of flooding. Proper understanding of floodwater infiltration thus becomes a crucial component of our preparedness to meet the environmental challenges of projected climate change. In this paper, we present the results of a long-term infiltration experiment performed on fractured ash flow tu...

*Correspondence: Erik F. Braudeau, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, Pédologie Hydrostructurale, 32 Avenue Henri Varagnat, 93140 Bondy, France e-mail: [email protected] Current soil water models do not take into account the internal organization of the soil medium and consequently ignore the physical interaction between the water film at the surface of solids that form the soil st...

Highway runoff from IP 4, a mountain road in the north-east of Portugal, has been monitored using a system integrating a raingauge, a flowmeter and an automatic water sampler. Average daily traffic (ADT) is 6000 and the study catchment has 5970 m2 of total area and 2500 m2 of road pavement. A single stormwater outlet discharges into an infiltration pond with overflow to a creek. Sampling was ca...

Many semiarid and arid soils are prone to irrigation-induced erosion. Polyacrylamide (PAM) greatly reduces erosion from furrow irrigation. We hypothesized that PAM applied via sprinklers will provide erosion control and benefit water infiltration and aggregate stability. Screened (6.4 mm) Rad silt loam (coarse silty, mixed, superactive mesic Durinodic Xeric Haplocambid) was placed in 1.5 by 1.2...

biological soil crusts (bscs) result from an intimate association between soil particles and cyanobacteria, algae, fungi, lichens and mosses in different proportions which live on the surface, or immediately in the uppermost millimeters of soil. therefore bscs cover the ground surface as a coherent layer, and influence primary processes such as carbon and nitrogen fixation and hydrologic status...

A Cellular Automata model for soil erosion by water, SCAVATU, was developed. It involves a larger number of states in comparison to the previous models: alti-sidering some of the most significant processes of the phenomenon: water flow, infiltration, soil erosion by water flow, sediment transport and deposition. Simulations gave encouraging results, in agreement with the findings of other studi...

Inverse optimization of parameters offers an economical means to infer soil hydraulic properties from in situ measurements of infiltration. We evaluated optimization strategies to inversely estimate soil hydraulic parameters using field measured tension disc infiltrometer data. We estimated the parameters n, , and Ks of the van Genuchten-Mualem (VGM) model, and a piecewise representation of con...

In surface irrigation, the soil serves as a medium for infiltration and conveying water from upstream to the downstream end of a field. In this study, infiltration properties of the Sibaya (Si) soil series (Glenrosa in the South African soil classification system) were determined by a volume balance method using a two-point approach technique. The purpose of the study was to examine the effect ...