View article

Water and solute transport in the vadose zone greatly depends on the physical and chemical properties of the soil, which generally exhibit high variability. Additionally, the experimental determination of those properties in the field or laboratory is tedious, time-consuming and involves considerable uncertainty for most practical applications. Recently, inverse modeling has been introduced to estimate effective properties in situ by deducing them from, e.g. a measured time series of soil water content. Inverse methods combine forward soil water flow models with appropriate optimization algorithms to find the best parameter set that minimizes an objective function. Global optimization methods are suitable for locating a global optimum for a given set of conditions (number of parameters, boundary conditions, etc.). In this paper we estimate the soil hydraulic properties of a sprinkler fertigated banana plot in the North of …