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In West Africa, as in many other estuaries, enormous volumes of marine water are entering the continent. Fresh water discharge is very low, and it is commonly strongly linked to rainfall level. Some of these estuaries are inverse estuaries. During the Great Sahelian Drought (1968&ndash, 1993), their hyperhaline feature was exacerbated. This paper aims to describe the evolution of the two main West African inverse estuaries, those of the Saloum River and the Casamance River, since the end of the drought. Water salinity measurements were carried out over three to five years according to the sites in order to document this evolution and to compare data with the historical ones collected during the long dry period at the end of 20th century. The results show that in both estuaries, the mean water salinity values have markedly decreased since the end of the drought. However, the Saloum estuary remains a totally inverse estuary, while for the Casamance River, the estuarine turbidity maximum (ETM) is the location of the salinity maximum, and it moves according to the seasons from a location 1&ndash, 10 km downwards from the upstream estuary entry, during the dry season, to a location 40&ndash, 70 km downwards from this point, during the rainy season. These observations fit with the functioning of the mangrove, the West African mangrove being among the few in the world that are markedly increasing since the beginning of the 1990s and the end of the dry period, as mangrove growth is favored by the relative salinity reduction. Finally, one of the inverse estuary behavior factors is the low fresh water incoming from the continent. The small area of the Casamance and Saloum basins (20,150 and 26,500 km&sup2, respectively) is to be compared with the basins of their two main neighbor basins, the Gambia River and the Senegal River, which provide significant fresh water discharge to their estuary.

Forests are thought to play an important role in the regional dynamics of the West African monsoon, through their capacity to extract water from a permanent and deep groundwater table to the atmosphere even during the dry season. It should be the case for riparian forests too, as these streambank forests are key landscape elements in Sudanian West Africa. The interplay of riparian forest and groundwater in the local hydrodynamics was investigated, by quantifying their contribution to the water balance. Field observations from a comprehensively instrumented hillslope in northern Benin were used. Particular attention was paid to measurements of actual evapotranspiration, soil water and deep groundwater levels. A vertical 2-D hydrological modelling approach using the Hydrus software was used as a testing tool to understand the interactions between the riparian area and the groundwater. The model was calibrated and evaluated using a multi-criteria approach (reference simulation). A virtual experiment, including three other simulations, was designed (no forest, no groundwater, neither forest nor groundwater). The model correctly simulated the hydrodynamics of the hillslope regarding vadose zone dynamics, deep groundwater fluctuation and actual evapotranspiration dynamics. The virtual experiment showed that the riparian forest transpiration depleted the deep groundwater table level and disconnected it from the river, which is consistent with the observations. The riparian forest and the deep groundwater table actually form an interacting transpiration system: the high transpiration rate in the riparian area was shown to be due to the existence of the water table, supplied by downslope lateral water flows within the hillslope soil layer. The simulated riparian transpiration rate was practically steady all year long, around 7.6 mm d−1. This rate lies within high-end values of similar study results. The riparian forest as simulated here contributes to 37% of the annual hillslope transpiration, and reaches 57% in the dry season, whereas it only covers 5% of the hillslope area.

The development of a physically based model for flow and transport in hillslope transects is presented. In the second paper of this set, Connell et al. [this issue] use this model as the fundamental unit in a catchment application to describe flow within flood-irrigated catchments. The hillslope transect model is based on the assumption that surface and groundwater flow is one-dimensional, flowing down the topographic gradient. This approximation is particularly accurate for flood-irrigated catchments where the land surface is divided into irrigation bays. To maximize the model's utility for catchment modeling, a number of simplifications to the process descriptions are introduced to reduce model complexity and computational overhead. The description of the unsaturated zone makes a distinction between infiltration and capillary rise, allowing infiltration to be a mixture of macropore and matrix flow and capillary rise to be a porous medium process. The capillary rise description exploits the transition in flow behavior as soil dries from being atmosphere-limited to profile-controlled. An efficient Laplace space quasi-analytical solution to Richards' equation is used for this second stage. This quasi-analytical procedure is also used to solve the advection-dispersion equation for unsaturated solute transport and for Darcian groundwater flow. The model is tested through application to a field site where detailed observations of surface and subsurface flow and transport are available. The good agreement with observations in both calibration and long-duration simulations of a wide range of physical processes promotes confidence in the model representation.

Tension disk infiltrometer experiments are generally conducted until apparent steady state is reached because most of the methods of analysis are based on Wooding's solution for steady state flux. However, the time necessary to reach steady state may be a penalizing aspect for soils with low permeability and the information contained in the transient stages is not utilized. Moreover, these methods assume homogeneous soil and a uniform initial water content, which may be unrealistic when a large volume of soil is sampled. In this series, we propose and compare several new methods of analysis that are based on the transient stage of axisymmetric infiltration. In the first part, we show that a two-parameter equation-one term linear in square root of time and one term linear in time-adequately describes the transient flow from the disk infiltrometer for both simulated and laboratory tests. The technique used for the determination of the two coefficients must meet two criteria; it must verify the validity of the two-term equation throughout the duration of the experiment, and it must account for the early-time perturbation that is induced by the sand-contact layer placed between the disk and the soil. We show that the best technique consists in linearizing the data by differentiating cumulative infiltration with respect to the square root of time. Direct nonlinear fitting on cumulative infiltration or infiltration flux is likely to lead to unacceptable errors, either because of the undetected invalidity of the two-parameter equation or arising from the influence of the contact layer.

Salinisation of Australia's agricultural lands and inland waterways is a widespread problem and its management involves significant financial resources. A key component in understanding catchment salt export is interpreting the on-land processes which determine runoff and groundwater recharge/discharge. This paper presents a decision support system for irrigation management based around a predictive model for water and salt movement within irrigation bays. The “bay model” employs a physically-based formulation, where: groundwater movement is explained by Darcy's equation; capillary rise by a quasi–equilibrium approach and overland flow by a Mannings type equation. The bay model is tested through application to a field site where water and salt transport processes were intensively monitored over a two-year period. Model predictions of overland flow and transport, groundwater and unsaturated water movement are shown to be in close agreement with field observations. An objective function is defined which incorporates irrigation efficiency (drain flow), the soil moisture deficit after irrigation, and the duration of surface ponding during irrigation events. The response of the constraints which make up this objective function are investigated with respect to irrigation practice and, as a result, the objective function is refined. This objective function is then incorporated into an optimisation algorithm (Powell's method) which is used to identify the management arrangements which lead to efficient water use.

The process of rainfall infiltration into crusted soil has been the focus of many analytical and numerical studies. However, most of these studies have been supported by laboratory data because no field data were available. Following recent field experiments on crusted soils, which provided crust co

Within the scope of the HAPEX-Sahel experiment, the hydrological functioning of two small nested catchments was studied at two different scales: the plot scale (of the order of 100 m2) and the catchment scale (0.2 km2). At local scale, four runoff plots were set-up on the typical soil surface conditions observed on the catchments (plateau bare soil, two plots on fallow grassland) and an additional one was installed on a millet field. soil moisture investigations at the plot scale have shown that infiltration was limited between 0.6 to 2 m deep on three sites, but was deeper than 3.4 m on the most pervious site (millet). The maximum water storage on all the sites was found to be reached at the maximum activity of the rainy season (late August), and not at the end of the season. During the dry months, the soil was fully dried off by evapotranspiration, resulting in the absence of inter-annual soil water storage. No influence of vegetation cover on runoff was observed on the fallow sites, but runoff generation was found to be very sensitive to tillage on the millet field. The parameter Pu, calculated from a rainfall hyetograph and defined as the rainfall depth that can actually produce runoff, is shown to be relevant to compute runoff on untilled soils, as it explains more than 87% of the variance in runoff depth. On tilled soils, it is necessary to take into account additionally the temporal evolution of the soil surface, especially the days after weeding operations. Simple linear relationships were derived to compute runoff depth from Pu on the plots for the most typical soil moisture conditions observed, and modified SCS equations have been derived for the catchments. Using the linear equations derived at the plot scale in a simple, empirical, semi-distributed model lead to formulate the assumption that the partial source area concept applied on the catchments. Analysis of discharge data at the catchment scale highlights that seepage through the bottom of a gully between two gauging stations leads to the abstraction of non negligible volumes of water. Moreover, the water totally infiltrates in a spreading zone downstream from the outlet of the largest catchment showing that discontinuities occur in the surface water transmission within a catena. Such discontinuities constitute a major problem for the concern of aggregation of hydrologic processes.

In the framework of the HAPEX-Sahel experiment, a data set was gathered on a fallow savannah site of the Central East Supersite. This includes 54 days of atmospheric forcing (air temperature and humidity, wind speed, solar and long-wave radiation and rainfall), net radiation, sensible, latent and soil heat fluxes and soil temperature series at a time step of 20 min. Furthermore, 17 soil moisture profiles, the evolution of the leaf area indices and some soil characteristics were available. The data set was used, at the field scale, to calibrate and validate the SiSPAT (simple soil plant atmosphere transfer) model, a 1D model of coupled heat and mass transfer in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. The objectives of the study were (i) to assess the performances of the model in the prediction of the diurnal cycle of net radiation, turbulent fluxes, soil temperatures and the evolution of soil water content over a period of 54 days (day of the year 239–292, 1992), characterized by early stage intense rainfall events and fast drying afterwards, (ii) to analyse the influence of soil surface crust on the water balance and (iii) to identify the 1D modelling limits when the surface area consists of two strates: a ground sparse herb layer, characterized by a large spatial variability of surface properties and water content with scattered bushes. The model was calibrated over a 2-week period and then run over the whole 54-day period. We were able to reproduce the main characteristics of the observed net radiation, turbulent fluxes, soil temperature and soil moisture for the intense rainfall events and for an elongated dry period. Nevertheless, when the crust was not taken into account, the rainfall-runoff-infiltration process and the evapotranspiration after rain were poorly predicted (overestimation of evapotranspiration of infiltration). When a crust was considered to model the water balance at the field scale, its influence was found to be substantial on the runoff generation and the infiltration, and consequently on the bare soil evaporation. However, runoff predictions were much larger than the observations. Indeed, at the field scale, no runoff was generally observed. Lateral redistribution of water between crusted and noncrusted zones was observed in the plot. However, this cannot be taken into account with the presented 1D deterministic modelling. Hence further model development is needed to yield a better representation of soil water fluxes at the field scale.

Although soil crusting has long been recognized as a crucial runoff factor in the Sahel, very few field methods have been developed for the measurement of the crust hydraulic conductivity, which is difficult to achieve because of the small thickness of most surface crusts. A field method, based on the simultaneous use of disc infiltrometers and minitensiometers is proposed for determining the crust hydraulic conductivity and sorptivity near saturation. On crusted soils, the classical analysis of the steady state water flow was found to be inadequate. The proposed method is based on sorptivity measurements performed at different water supply potentials and uses recent developments of transient flow analysis. A minitensiometer, placed horizontally at the crust-subsoil interface, facilitated the analysis of the infiltration regime for the crust solely. Results are shown for representative soil units of the East Central Super Site of the HAPEX-Sahel experiment: fallow grasslands, millet fields and tiger bush. Non-crusted soils were also considered and validated the transient method as demonstrated by comparison with Wooding's steady state solution. This validation was obtained in the case of fallow grasslands soil but not for the millet fields. In this latter case, the persistent effects of localized working of the soil to remove weeds caused large variations in infiltration fluxes between the sampling points, which tended to dominate over effects of differences in applied potential. For the tiger bush crusted soils, the ratio of the saturated hydraulic conductivity of the crust to that of the underlying soil ranges from 13 to 16, depending on whether the crust is of a structural (ST) or sedimentation (SED) type. The method also allows the estimation of a functional mean pore size, consistent with laboratory measurements, and 40% less for the crusts in comparison with the underlying soil. The results obtained here will be used in hydrological models to predict the partition of rainfall between infiltration and runoff.

Watershed management requires systematic measurements in order to reach good resources control. Some processes conditioning water transfers in the environment such as rain, run-off, infiltration, deep percolation, water uptake by plants, and evapotranspiration should be quantified to improve our knowledge of hydrological characterization and of the best management practices (Descroix/Nouvelot, 1997; Descroix et al., 2004). This work presents infiltration measurements and results produced with the Suction Disc Infiltrometer method realized in the Upper Nazas River Basin. This basin is the main water supply for Irrigation District 017 in northern Mexico, called the Lagunera region. Results show that soil surface controls the hydrodynamic behaviour of the watershed. Land use changes can be linked with productive practices that are causing strong hydrological consequences.

In Part 1 of this paper, an error analysis for estimating the variance of volumetric water content, soil water storage and actual evapotranspiration from a local standpoint was presented. This second part extends the analysis to the case of spatial average values corresponding to a field scale. For a low number of sampling points, the location component related to the spatial variability is the major component of the total variance of the foregoing variables. Results are presented for the two maize fields described in Part 1 and comparison is made with values of evapotranspiration provided by atmospheric latent heat flux measurements for one of them. Finally, the determination of the calibration, instrument, integration and location components of the variance of a given variable leads to an estimation of the number of sampling points required to estimate field average values with a prescribed degree of precision. This number varies significantly depending on the variable considered — water content, water storage or evapotranspiration — and proved to be different for the two fields.

The study was aimed at evaluating the effect of rainfall and tillage-induced soil surface characteristics on infiltration and runoff on a 2.8 ha catchment located in the central region of Senegal. This was done by simulating 30 min rain storms applied at a constant rate of about 70 mm h(-1), on 10 runoff microplots of 2 m(2), five being freshly harrowed perpendicularly to the slope and five along the slope (1%) of the catchment. Runoff was automatically recorded at the outlet of each plot. Hydraulic properties such as capillary sorptivity and hydraulic conductivity of the sandy loam soil close to saturation were determined by running 48 infiltration tests with a tension disc infiltrometer. That allowed the calculation of a mean characteristic pore size hydraulically active and a time to ponding. Superficial water storage capacity was estimated using data collected with an electronic relief meter. Because the soil was subject to surface crusting, crust-types as well as their spatial distribution within micro-plots and their evolution with time were identified and monitored by taking photographs at different times after tillage. The results showed that the surface crust-types as well as their tillage dependent dynamics greatly explain the decrease of hydraulic conductivity and sorptivity as the cumulative rainfall since tillage increases. The exponential decaying rates were found to be significantly greater for the soil harrowed along the slope (where the runoff crust-type covers more than 60% of the surface after 140 mm of rain) than across to the slope (where crusts are mainly of structural (60%) and erosion (40%) types). That makes ponding time smaller and runoff more important. Also it was shown that soil hydraulic properties after about 160 mm of rain were close to those of untilled plot not submitted to any rain. That indicates that the effects of tillage are short lived. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This article describes measurements made at each site and for each vegetation cover as part of the soils program for the HAPEX-Sahel regional scale experiment. The measurements were based on an initial sampling scheme and included profile soil water content, surface soil water content, soil water potential, infiltration rates, additional measurements on core samples, and grain size analysis. The measurements were used to categorize the state of the surface and profile soil water regimes during the experiment and to derive functional relationships for the soil water characteristic curve, unsaturated hydraulic conductivity function, and infiltration function. Sample results for different supersites and different vegetation covers are presented showing soil water profiles and total soil water storage on days corresponding to the experimental 'Golden Days'. Sample results are also presented for spatial and temporal distribution of surface moisture content and infiltration tests. The results demonstrate that the major experimental objective of monitoring the supersites during the most rapid vegetative growth stage with the largest change of the surface energy balance following the rainy season was very nearly achieved. Separation of the effects of probable root activity and drainage of the soil profile is possible. The potential for localized advection between the bare soil and vegetation strips of the tiger bush sites is demonstrated.