Replacing space with time: Analysing dynamic transport experiments to assess the unresolved spatial variability of flow and transport in the unsaturated soil

Vanclooster, Marnik
(2018) Séminaire invité — Location: University of Monash, Melbourne, Australia (2.March.2018)

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Abstract
The unsaturated soil plays a critical role in hydrology, as it controls the splitting of precipitation in infiltration, runoff and evapotranspiration and the recharge of groundwater. Given the non-linearity of unsaturated flow and transport processes, small scale spatial variability of soil hydraulic properties have strong impacts on these hydrological functions. For effective modelling of hydrological functions we therefore need to assess the small scale variability of soil water properties. Assessing the small scale variability of soil flow and transport properties from high resolution spatially distributed and disturbed sampling is only possible in controlled research environments, and it is cost and labour intensive. An alternative consists therefore in applying hydrogeophysical techniques (e.g. ERT or GPR) to assess proxies of soil water functioning, and subsequently inferring the moments of the small scale variation from the statistical properties of the proxies. Yet another alternative consists in effective dynamic monitoring of flow and transport in the unsaturated zone and inferring data on the small scale spatial variability using inverse modelling techniques. We illustrate in this seminar on how unresolved variability of unsaturated flow and transport can be inferred from applied hydrogeophysical techniques (TDR, ERT and GPR) and dynamic flow experiments at the undisturbed soil monolith scale, the field scale and the hillslope scale. Information from such experiments are pivotal for including unresolved variability of unsaturated flow and transport in effective hydrological models, and for downscaling remote sensed hydrological products to spatial scales that are relevant for process description and water management.
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Vanclooster, M. (2018). Replacing space with time: Analysing dynamic transport experiments to assess the unresolved spatial variability of flow and transport in the unsaturated soil. Séminaire invité, University of Monash, Melbourne, Australia. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/172633