The spatial variability of water and solute transport properties in unsaturated soil

We analyzed the possibility of introducing a single stochastic scaling parameter a to describe the spatial variability of soil hydraulic properties, using the soil hydraulic properties of the Hamra field (Russo and Bresler 1981) and the Panache field (Nielsen, Biggar, and Erh 1973). In the traditional approach (Peck, Luxmoore, and Stolzy 1977; Russo and Bresler 1980; Warrick, Mullen, and Nielsen 1977), sets of scaling factors are estimated from the h(s) and K(s) functions. For "perfectly similar media," the two sets of a should be identical. Even though the sets of a in these studies were found to be correlated (table 2), they possessed different statistical properties, and were not identical. Results of structural analyses of the sets of a from the two fields suggested that the spatial structures of the two a-sets are quite distinct, reflecting the different spadal behavior of the h(θ) and the K(θ) functions. Moreover, there was poor correlation between the uncorrelated residuals of the a-sets, indicating that part of the high correlation between the a-sets found in earlier work must stem from the presence of an undetected drift and from correlation between nearby measurements. Under field conditions, the saturated hydraulic conductivity is controlled by the flow of water through large structural voids (macropores), which drain at very small negative values of water pressure. Because of this, we tried eliminating Ks by using relative hydraulic properties instead of the hydraulic properties themselves to estimate the scaling factor sets. For the Hamra field, for which we assumed that the hydraulic properties could be described by the model of Brooks and Corey (1964), we found the resultant sets of scaling factors to be highly correlated (R2 = 0.996) with the same spatial structure, but with slightly different variance. By examining the relationships between the two a-sets implied by the Brooks and Corey (1964) model we saw that (1) in general, both sets wi