Relationship between the Storage Coefficient and the Soil-Water Retention Curve in Subsurface Agricultural Drainage Systems: Water Table Drawdown
Publication: Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering
Volume 135, Issue 3
Abstract
Water dynamics in subsurface agricultural drainage systems are described by the Boussinesq equation for an unconfined aquifer that results from the continuity equation, the Darcy law, as well as from a hydrostatic pressure distribution hypothesis. The storage coefficient that appears in the equation is conceptualized according to the unsaturated zone that results from water table drawdown during the drainage process. The difference between drained depth and drainable depth, as well as the hydrostatic pressure distribution hypothesis, allows us to infer a relationship between storage coefficient, drainable porosity, and the soil-water retention curve. This relationship is illustrated by using the van Genuchten and Fujita–Parlange soil-water retention curves. Both resulting storage coefficient expressions are validated in an experiment reported in the literature using a numeric solution of the one-dimensional Boussinesq equation. A good description of the experimental results leads to a conclusion in which the proposed relationship between storage coefficient and the soil-water retention curve can be used in the context of studies in water dynamics in subsurface agricultural drainage systems.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by CONACYT (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología) through Project No. UNSPECIFIEDSEP-2004-C01-47083/A1.
References
Bear, J. (1972). Dynamics of fluids in porous media, Dover, New York.
Bhattacharya, A. K., and Broughton, R. S. (1979). “Variable drainable porosity in drainage design.” J. Irrig. and Drain. Div., 105(1), 71–89.
Bouwer, H. (1966). “Rapid field measurement of air entry value and hydraulic conductivity of soil as significant parameters in flow system analysis.” Water Resour. Res., 2, 729–738.
Dumm, L. D. (1954). “Drain spacing formula.” Agric. Eng., 35, 726–730.
Fuentes, C., Haverkamp, R., and Parlange, J.-Y. (1992). “Parameter constraints on closed-form soil-water relationships.” J. Hydrol., 134, 117–142.
Fujita, H. (1952). “The exact pattern of a concentration-dependent diffusion in a semi-infinite medium: Part II.” Text. Res. J., 22, 823–827.
Gardner, W. R. (1958). “Some steady-state solutions of the unsaturated moisture flow equation with application to evaporation from a water table.” Soil Sci., 85, 228–232.
Gupta, R. K., Bhattacharya, A. K., and Chandra, P. (1994). “Unsteady drainage with variable drainage porosity.” J. Irrig. Drain. Eng., 120(4), 703–715.
Haverkamp, R., Zammit, C., Bouraoui, F., Rajkai, K., Arrúe, J. L., and Heckmann, N. (1998). GRIZZLY, Grenoble catalogue of soils, survey of soil field data and description of particle-size, soil water retention and hydraulic conductivity functions, Laboratoire d’Etude des Transferts en Hydrologie et Environnement (LTHE), Grenoble, France.
Kumar, S., Gupta, S. K., and Ram, S. (1991). “Inverse techniques for estimating transmissivity and drainable pore space utilizing data from subsurface drainage experiment.” Agric. Water Manage., 26, 41–58.
Mathew, E. K., and Vos, J. (2003). “Determination of drainage parameters in the low-lying acid sulphate coastal wetlands of Kerala, India.” Proc., 9th Int. Drainage Workshop, Utrecht, The Netherlands, Paper No. 011, Alterra-ILRI, Wageningen, The Netherlands.
Mori, M. (1986). The finite element method and its applications, Macmillan, New York.
Noor, A., and Peters, J. M. (1987). “Preconditioned conjugate gradient technique for the analysis of symmetric structures.” Int. J. Numer. Methods Eng., 24, 2057–2070.
Pandey, R. S., Bhattacharya, A. K., Singh, O. P., and Gupta, S. K. (1992). “Drawdown solution with variable drainable porosity.” J. Irrig. Drain. Eng., 118(3), 382–396.
Parlange, J.-Y., Lisle, I., Braddock, R. D., and Smith, R. E. (1982). “The three-parameter infiltration equation.” Soil Sci. 133, 337–341.
Pinder, G. E., and Gray, W. G. (1977). Finite element simulation in surface and subsurface hydrology, 1st Ed., Academic, New York.
Samani, J. M. V., Fathi, P., and Homaee, M. (2007). “Simultaneous prediction of saturated hydraulic conductivity and drainable porosity using the inverse problem technique.” J. Irrig. Drain. Eng., 133(2), 110–115.
Sing, R. K., Prasher, S. O., Chauhan, H. S., Gupta, S. K., Bonnell, R. B., and Madramootoo, C. A. (1996). “An analytical solution of the Boussinesq equation for subsurface drainage in the presence of evapotranspiration.” Trans. ASAE, 39(3), 953–960.
Taylor, G. S. (1960). “Drainable porosity evaluation from outflow measurements and its use in drawdown equations.” Soil Sci., 90, 338–343.
Upadhyaya, A., and Chauhan, H. S. (2000). “An analytical solution for bi-level drainage design in the presence of evapotranspiration.” Agric. Water Manage., 45, 169–184.
van Genuchten, M. Th. (1980). “A closed-form equation for predicting the hydraulic conductivity of the unsaturated soils.” Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J., 44, 892–898.
Zavala, M., Fuentes, C., and Saucedo, H. (2007). “Nonlinear radiation in the Boussinesq equation of agricultural drainage.” J. Hydrol., 332(3–4), 374–380.
Zienkiewicz, O. C., Taylor, R. L., and Zhu, J. Z. (2005). The finite element method: Its basis and fundamental, 6th Ed., Elsevier, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Copyright
© 2009 ASCE.
History
Received: Jul 9, 2007
Accepted: Sep 12, 2008
Published online: May 15, 2009
Published in print: Jun 2009
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.