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ThesisItem Open Access SOIL WATER FLOW CHARACTERIZATION AND PREDICTION IN TWO DIFFERENT SOIL TYPES.(Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, 2009) Jagdish SinghThe present investigation was carried out at Purdue University in partnership with National Soil Erosion Research Laboratory, West Lafayette, USA. Two sites in Ceder Creek watershed of northwestern Indiana, USA with varying soil texture were selected to characterize the water flow behavior in soils with varying clay content and to simulate and compare soil water flow using Hydrus_1D and Kamel models. Clay content of AS1 site varies from 20-37% with depth while clay content variation for AS2 was 28-40%. The present study shows that hydraulic conductivity of soil decreases with increase in clay content, and also decrease with depth. The pedostructure parameters for Kamel were estimated using a pedotransfer function named Kamelsoil and parameters for Hydrus-1D were estimated from SOILPAR2.The sensitivity analysis of Kamel model show that value of Kbs (slope of shrinkage curve for basic water content), Va (volume of pedostructure at dry state) and AlphaL (coefficient of high range of macropores) are the most sensitive parameter for Kamel model input. The calibration for Kamel and Hydrus-1D was carried out for 15 day time period. The calibrated parameters were used for the validation of both model under both sites AS1 and AS2. Both models were found to be in good agreement with measured water content at 5 cm and 20 cm layer for site AS1, but performance of Kamel was better than Hydrus-1D for deeper layers. For AS2 site, Kamel performed better than Hydrus-1D irrespective of the depth of soil. It was observed that both models were weak in simulating crop growth and to keep account of variable water uptake rates during different growth stages.
