Factors affecting preferential flow and transport in the vadose zone need to be investigated by experiments and simulations to protect groundwater against surface applied chemicals. The objectives of this study were to investigate the effects of several factors (soil structure, initial soil water content (SWC), and application rate) and their interactions on the extent of preferential flow and ...

In this study we investigate the effect of a water table boundary on solute spreading during infiltration in the vadose zone of heterogeneous soils. It has been found recently that the presence of the water table significantly affects unsaturated flow in a heterogeneous vadose zone and causes the flow to be spatially nonstationary. Because a vadose zone is by definition bounded by the water tab...

Vulnerability assessment to delineate areas that are more susceptible to contamination from anthropogenic sources has become an important element for sensible resource management and land use planning. This contribution aims at estimating aquifer vulnerability by applying the DRASTIC model as well as utilizing sensitivity analyses to evaluate the relative importance of the model parameters for ...

A small subsurface ion mobility spectrometer (SS-IMS) was constructed and tested with several environmental contaminants to determine its potential for monitoring gaseous volatile organic compounds in the vadose zone. Trichloroethylene (TCE) and tetrachloroethylene (PCE) were detected and separated in IMS for the first time. Detection limits as low as 1 part per billion volume-to-volume (ppb(v)...

Journal of Environmental Hydrology Volume 17 Paper 7 February 2009 1 A parallelized large-scale regional hydrologic soil model (RHSM) is developed as a tool for large-scale unsaturated zone investigations. It is applied to simulate the temporal and spatial responses of the unsaturated zone and the regional water budget under the forcing of realistic precipitation and evaporation scenarios. The ...