Abstract
Over the past 15 years, the University of Arizona has carried out four controlled infiltration experiments in a 3, 600 m2, 15 m deep vadose zone during which the evolution of moisture content and matric potential was monitored and the subsurface stratigraphy, texture, and bulk density were characterized. This chapter will first provide a brief overview of the site characteristics and the available data. Subsequently a geospatial analysis using old and recently acquired data will be carried out to demonstrate that a vertical domain trend due to alluvial layering must be accounted for. The resulting model for subsurface texture is used to reanalyze a neutron probe calibration set, such that unbiased texture-dependent estimates of soil moisture become possible. The resulting models are applied to the third infiltration experiment conducted at the site (January 2001 to February 2002) and interpreted with moment analysis based on depth-mean moisture contents. The work presented here is a first step towards a full reanalysis of the site’s data, which in future publications will also include flow and transport modeling and an assessment how much data and of what kind are needed to build an acceptable vadose zone model.
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Acknowledgments
The author thanks Professor S. P. Neuman and Y. Zhang, both at the University of Arizona for valuable discussions. Site construction and field observations were supported by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission under contract number NRC-04–97–056 (1997–2002). The data collection for and the development of the geospatial model was supported in part by NSF-EAR grant 0737945 (2005–2009). The reanalysis of the neutron calibration data and moment analysis was supported in part through a contract between the University of Arizona and Vanderbilt University under the Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation (CRESP) III, funded by the US Department of Energy (2012).
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Schaap, M.G. (2013). Description, Analysis, and Interpretation of an Infiltration Experiment in a Semiarid Deep Vadose Zone. In: Mishra, P., Kuhlman, K. (eds) Advances in Hydrogeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6479-2_8
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