Hydrus

Abstract: The purpose of the present research, was evaluating the performance of HYDRUS-3D model for simulating soil moisture under field conditions for corn and durum wheat in a Mediterranean climat...

Abstract: The spatial variability of rainfall at the soil surface and tree roots in a coastal sand dune forest was investigated. Various scenario simulations were further conducted using calibrated HYDRUS models to assess the effects of these vegetation-related variability patterns on soil moisture dynamics and the water balance. Vadose zone soil moisture and groundwater recharge in forested ecosystems can be influenced by canopy architecture and root systems. Spatial distributions of surface rainfall and tree roots were observed at the canopy and intercanopy areas in a coastal sand dune forest of subtropical Australia. We further explored the effects of these vegetation-associated spatial patterns on the spatiotemporal dynamics of soil moisture and deep drainage in this system using calibrated HYDRUS models. Simulated soil moisture and deep drainage were found higher at the intercanopy area than the canopy area due to the reinforced effects of rainfall interception and root water uptake. Spatial analysis of deep drainage at various locations across the canopy–intercanopy transect resulted in an average deep drainage of 1347 mm yr−1 (65% of annual gross rainfall), with 68% of total deep drainage occurring at the intercanopy area. The scenario analyses indicate that the spatial variability of rainfall at the soil surface is not important for the larger scale groundwater balance in our coastal sand dune forest. However, deep drainage was underestimated by 130 to 162 mm (9.7–12.0% drop compared with baseline scenario) as a consequence of uniform representation of heterogeneous root systems in one- or axisymmetric three-dimensional HYDRUS models. Our HYDRUS simulations indicated that translating the hydrological effects of the two-dimensional tree structure (rainfall redistribution and heterogeneous roots) to a one-dimensional lumped vertical conceptualization in coastal sand dune forests needs to be undertaken with caution.

Abstract: Soil water repellency affects soil water movement during infiltration significantly. The HYDRUS software has been popularly applied in soil water dynamics simulation for many years, but its perform...

Abstract: Numerical solution of the Richards equation implemented in HYDRUS water module could improve response of surface soil water dynamics to precipitation pattern, compared to the original, and consequently it resulted in annual N gaseous emission loss about 1.5 ∼ 2 times higher. While the two flow modules predicted similar amounts of annual water drainage, the HYDRUS water module simulated more frequent, but smaller drainage fluxes, which favors soil mineralization and downward transport. In normal precipitation years, annual leaching losses predicted by the HYDRUS coupled DAYCENT model was about 5–18 kg N ha −1 higher due to different temporal patterns of daily water drainage. In dry and wet years, leaching losses were similar. Our analysis suggests that it is necessary to fully capture dynamics of transient water flow (e.g., by numerically solving the transient Richards equation) in order to adequately estimate soil N gaseous emissions and N transport and thus leaching, although it requires more computational resources while the uncertainty in model improvement is still large due to lack of measurements.