A New Method for Estimating Hydraulic Parameters by Measuring Soil Moisture in the Field

In this study, the values of moisture and soil temperature were estimated at different depths and times under unsteady conditions by solving the Richards’ equation in an explicit finite difference method provided in Visual Studio C#. For the estimation of soil hydraulic parameters, including av and nv (coefficients of van Genuchten’s equation) and Ks (saturated hydraulic conductivity), soil moisture and temperature at different depths were measured by TDR probes and the stability apparatus, respectively. The objective function [equal to Root Mean Square Error (RMSE)] was minimized by the optimization of a parameter separately, using the Newton-Raphson method, while, the other parameters were considered as the constant values. Then, by replacing the optimized value of this parameter, the same was done for other parameters. The procedure of optimization was iterated until reaching minor changes to the objective function. The results showed that soil hydraulic parameters (coefficients of van Genuchten’s equation) could be optimized by using the SWCT (Soil Water Content and Temperature) model with measuring the soil water content at different depths and meteorological parameters including the minimum and maximum temperature,, air vapor pressure, rainfall and solar radiation. Finally, the measured values of soil moisture and temperature were compared to the depth of 70cm in spring, summer, and autumn of 2015. The values of the normalized RMSE of soil water content were 0.090, 0.096 and 0.056 at the soil depths of 5, 35 and 70 cm, respectively, while the values of the normalized RSME of soil temperatures were 2.000, 1.175 and 1.5 oC at these depths, respectively. In this research, the values of soil hydraulic parameters were compared with other previous models in a wider range of soil moisture varying from saturation to air dry condition, as more preferred in soil researches.