Obtaining soil hydraulic properties for water balance and leaching models from survey data. 2. Hydraulic conductivity

Abstract

Regional scale application of water and solute transport models is often limited by the lack of available data describing soil hydraulic properties and their variability. Direct measurement over large areas is expensive and time consuming. Physico-empirical models derived from soil survey data are therefore an attractive alternative. If the Marshall method of estimating the saturated hydraulic conductivity is simplified to depend primarily on the maximum pore radius, given by the bubbling pressure, then it is equivalent to the Campbell model of saturated hydraulic conductivity which relies entirely on an estimate of the bubbling pressure obtained from particle size data. We apply this simplified physico-empirical model to estimate the