A new paper has been published in Water and is now online.
Title:Impact of infiltration process modeling on soil water content simulations for irrigation management
Abstract: The uncertainty in a hydrological model, due to its structure
or implemented input parameters, affects the accuracy of simulations that
are usually used for important applications such as drought predictions,
flood risk assessment, irrigation scheduling, ground water recharge and
contamination. Several models describing soil infiltration processes have
been developed. Some are analytical, while others implement numerical
solutions of the Richards’ equation. The objective of this work was to
assess the impact of infiltration process modeling on soil water content
simulations. For this study, different infiltration models were included
within FEST-WB (Flash Flood Event-based Spatially-distributed rainfall-runoff
Transformations-Water Balance) distributed hydrological model (SCS-CN, Green and Ampt,
Philip and Ross solution). Performances of implemented infiltration models in
simulating soil water content were evaluated against observations acquired in
the experimental site located in a maize field in northern Italy. Soil water
content was monitored together with continuous measurements of meteorological data.
A sensitivity analysis was performed to assess the most important parameters
governing infiltration process in the different models tested. A comparison
of soil water content simulations show that Ross solution allowed the
description of soil moisture variation along the vertical, but simpler
lumped models provide sufficient accuracy when properly calibrated
Infiltration modelling and irrigation management by Giovanni Ravazzani is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.