Saturated Hydraulic Conductivity and Textural Heterogeneity of Soils

Saturated hydraulic conductivity Ksat is an important soil parameter that highly depends on soil's particle size distribution (PSD). The nature of this dependency is explored in this work in two ways, (1) by using the Information Entropy as a heterogeneity parameter of the PSD and (2) using descriptions of PSD in forms of textural triplets, different than the usual description in terms of the triplet of sand, silt and clay contents. The power of this parameter, as a descriptor of Ksat and log(Ksat) , was tested on a database of > 19 K soils. We found coefficients of determination of up to 0.977 for log(Ksat) using a triplet that combines very coarse, coarse, medium and fine sand as coarse particles, very fine sand as intermediate particles, and silt and clay as fines. The power of the correlation is analysed for different textural classes and different triplets. Overall, the use of textural triplets different than traditional, combined with IE, may provide a useful tool for predicting Ksat values.