Campus Units
Agronomy
Document Type
Article
Publication Version
Published Version
Publication Date
2003
Journal or Book Title
Vadose Zone Journal
Volume
2
Issue
4
First Page
539
Last Page
543
DOI
10.2136/vzj2003.5390
Abstract
Chemicals that leach through soil pose threats to surface and groundwater quality. It is difficult and expensive to measure subsurface chemical transport and the transport properties required for extrapolating predictions beyond limited observations. The objective of our study was to evaluate whether solute transport properties measured at the soil surface could be used to predict subsurface chemical movement. The study was conducted in a greenhouse soil pit. The solute transport properties of the surface 2-cm soil layer were determined by using time domain reflectometry (TDR) to measure the bulk electrical conductivity during a step application of CaCl2 solution. The movement of chemicals in the subsurface was measured within the top 30 cm of soil following a pulse input of CaCl2 solution. A comparison of the measured chemical transport properties in the surface and subsurface zones of the soil showed that the parameters were similar. Furthermore, the estimated parameters determined by the surface TDR method were used to predict the chemical concentration distributions within the 30-cm soil layer, and it was found that the centers of mass of predicted chemical distributions were not significantly different from the measured ones. Therefore, the surface TDR measurements could be used to successfully predict subsurface chemical transport within the upper 30 cm of the soil. This surface measurement technique is a promising tool for vadose zone chemical transport studies.
Rights
Works produced by employees of the U.S. Government as part of their official duties are not copyrighted within the U.S. The content of this document is not copyrighted.
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Gaur, Anju; Horton, Robert; Jaynes, Dan; Lee, Jaehoon; and Al-Jabri, Salem A., "Using Surface Time Domain Reflectometry Measurements to Estimate Subsurface Chemical Movement" (2003). Agronomy Publications. 364.
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/agron_pubs/364
Included in
Agricultural Science Commons, Agriculture Commons, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Commons, Soil Science Commons
Comments
This article is published as Gaur, Anju, Robert Horton, Dan B. Jaynes, Jaehoon Lee, and Salem A. Al-Jabri. "Using surface time domain reflectometry measurements to estimate subsurface chemical movement." Vadose Zone Journal 2, no. 4 (2003): 539-543. doi: 10.2136/vzj2003.5390. Posted with permission.