Abstract

ZATARAIN, Felipe; FUENTES, Carlos  and  RENDON, Luis. Conditions for modeling surface irrigation with effective soil hydraulic properties. Agrociencia [online]. 2017, vol.51, n.3, pp.245-264. ISSN 2521-9766.

To design a system of surface irrigation, it is common to take measurements during an irrigation event and deduce average or effective values of infiltration. However, spatial variability of the soils can be so great that the representativity of these values may be questionable. The hypothesis of this study was that it is valid to use the effective values of hydrodynamic properties of the soil in certain conditions of surface irrigation. The objective was to analyze these properties based on experimental information on infiltration and advance of water in border irrigation by generating correlated fields of hydraulic conductivity with a method grounded in spectral analysis. The analysis was complemented with modeling of the advance phase with values of hydrodynamic properties of the soil generated randomly from its probability distribution. Although the correlated fields had broad spatial variability, according to infiltrated profiles, advance in the simulations showed similar behavior. Inverse methods are valid to determine mean values of the hydrodynamic properties in surface irrigation when the probability distribution is unique in space.

Keywords : Infiltration; spatial variability; correlated fields.

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