Title: Grouping soil types based on soil properties- Impact on water balance modelling
Abstract: The hydraulic properties of soils play important role on the overall water balance and flow partitioning from landscapes to stream. In this paper, the variability of three soil attributes (soil depth, plant available water capacity and saturated hydraulic conductivity) is modelled to classify soil into broader hydrological groupings. Soils are typically mapped using pedological classifications rather than soil hydrology. Many soils that exhibit similar hydrological behaviour may be classified as different soils. The New South Wales portion of the Murray-Darling Basin has 355 soil types as described in McKenzie et al. (2000) which are widely used in hydrological modelling. When overlaid with current land use mapping and climatic zones, there are 48280 combinations of land use, soil type, and climate across the New South Wales Murray-Darling Basin. Statistical analysis of output from water balance modelling has been used to group these 355 soil types into 29 hydrological soil categories. Reducing the number of soil groupings has major computational benefits for the spatial modelling of soil water balance. For example, reducing the number of soil groupings from 355 to 29 reduces the number of combinations for land use, soil type and climate from 48280 (355 x 136) to 3944 (29 x 136). The new hydrological soil categories have been verified by comparing water balance differences between the neighbour soil categories and between soil types within one category. The results show that there are large differences between soil categories but few differences within one category.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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