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Division S-1—Soil Physics

Spatial Variability and Measurement Scale of Infiltration Rate on an Agricultural Landscape

^a School of Civil Engineering, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, IN 47907-2051
^b Dep. of Agronomy, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, IN 47907
^c Dep. of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801
^d Currently at Dep. of Geography and Environmental Engineering, Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, MD 21218-2686
^e Currently at National Lab of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Institute of Soil & Water Conservation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yangling, Shaanxi 712100, China

^* Corresponding author (pscr{at}purdue.edu).

Determining representative infiltration rate parameters for use in modeling field-scale flow and transport processes is difficult because of the spatial variability of soil properties. To determine how steady-state infiltration rate variability is affected by support scale, steady-state infiltration rates (I_s) were measured at three spatial scales (local, hillslope, and landscape) along a 710-m transect on a swell–swale landscape in Indiana. Spatial variability at the local scale was studied using measurements in a 1 x 1 m² array of 100 ring infiltrometers (7.2-cm diam.) for three soils at three horizons each. Studies were conducted at the hillslope and landscape scales using three nested infiltrometers of sizes 20 x 20, 60 x 60, and 100 x 100 cm². Geostatistical analyses show a decrease in the sample variance of the I_s values and an increase in spatial correlation of I_s with depth. They also suggest that an area >10, 7.2-cm diam. rings (i.e., approximately >400 cm²) is needed to provide a representative measurement area (RMA; i.e., area needed to filter out smaller-scale heterogeneities) at the local scale. Hillslope- and landscape-scale tests indicate that I_s measurements with infiltrometers require an infiltrometer with a support area greater than the local-scale RMA to show the spatial correlation of the larger scales. In addition, these infiltrometer measurements may not provide appropriate effective I_s estimates at these greater scales unless they are averaged over a domain that extends across the landscape's range of variability, estimated from the computed semivariograms to be 120 to 200 m for this study.

Abbreviations: I_s, steady-state infiltration rate • RMA, representative measurement area

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