Estimation of Border-Strip Soil Hydraulic Parameters
Publication: Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering
Volume 138, Issue 6
Abstract
The inverse problem of determining soil hydraulic parameters (saturated hydraulic conductivity and water retention parameters) of border-strip irrigation from irrigation event data is analyzed. The inverse problem is solved using sequential unconstrained minimization technique. The forward problem involves the solution of coupled Saint-Venant’s equation governing overland flow and Richard’s equation governing subsurface flow. Saint-Venant’s equations are solved using the MacCormack scheme–based finite-difference method while Richard’s equation is solved using a mass conservative fully implicit finite-difference method. Field experiments are conducted on two border strips to obtain surface and subsurface irrigation data such as irrigation advance, recession, flow depth, and soil moisture content. The soil hydraulic parameters, i.e., saturated hydraulic conductivity and soil retention parameters, are estimated by minimizing the deviations between the model-predicted and field-observed irrigation data. The results indicate that defining the objective function in terms of flow depths results in the optimization algorithm converging to the true values as compared to the use of irrigation advance data. Further, it is observed that underestimating the initial guess results in the least number of iterations for the optimization algorithm to converge to the true values. It is also observed that simultaneous estimation of all three soil hydraulic parameters is not possible even with the inclusion of subsurface moisture content data in the objective function.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering
Volume 138 • Issue 6 • June 2012
Pages: 493 - 502
Copyright
© 2012. American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Oct 22, 2010
Accepted: Jul 8, 2011
Published online: Jul 11, 2011
Published in print: Jun 1, 2012
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