| ABSTRACT Soil water retention is among the soil hydraulic properties most routinely measured in studies of soil physics and related areas. This property is used in dynamic simulations of vadose zone processes such as soil water availability, surface boundary processes of evaporation and infiltration, and the fate of soil pollutants. The most common measurement technique consists in establishing a hydrostatic equilibrium between an initially saturated soil sample and a porous medium at a certain tension on a tension table or pressure plate. However, there is reasonable doubt about the assumed hydrostatic equilibrium, especially in the dry range at low pressure heads. In this study we compared the traditional pressure plate apparatus protocol to an inverse... |
