Use of Scaling to Describe Temporal Variability of Soil Hydraulic Properties

Soil hydraulic properties exhibit spatio-temporal variability and are affected by both natural and human factors. Their knowledge is essential for assessing soil water regimes. Scaling methods based on similar media concept have been widely used to model the surface spatial and temporal variation of vadose zone processes while assuming that similarity conditions are preserved. Soil heterogeneity, changes in field conditions due to rainfall or irrigation and other factors lead to changes in boundary conditions which makes analysis based on similitude analyses or functional normalization difficult. However, inspectional analysis method can reduce known physical laws along with corresponding initial or boundary conditions to non-dimensional form while eliminating as many physical constants and variables as possible which is then used to obtain scale factors and similarity requirements. The objective of this study is to obtain scaling factors based on inspectional analysis to describe the temporal variability of soil hydraulic properties.