Estimation of saturated hydraulic conductivity in silty clay loam soils from soil bulk density and soil porosity

Abstract EN

Field experiment was conducted in 2009 on a bare soil to study the possibility of predicting the saturated hydraulic conductivity of the field soil (Ks) by using the easy field measured soil bulk density (BD) and porosity (St).This because of the complexity of the field measurement of (Ks) ; in addition to the fact that (Ks) field measurements cost a lot of money and efforts if the required measurements need to be done on the large scale field for example when irrigation or drainage system need to be designed.

The results show the nonlinear power function has a good power to predict (Ks) from the measured (BD) with R^2 = 0.71 which is significant at 0.05 probability level.

The linear relation between measured and predicted (Ks) has an R^2 = 0.87.

Moreover; the results show the best fitted regression model for the relation between (Ks) and (St) is the nonlinear power function without intercept which has an R^2 = 0.99, and the linear relation between measured and predicted (Ks) has an R^2 = 0.80.

These finding agree very well with previous finding of many researchers.