TY  - JOUR
AU  - Weber, Tobias K. D.
AU  - Finkel, Michael
AU  - Gonçalves, Maria
AU  - Vereecken, Harry
AU  - Diamantopoulos, Efstathios
TI  - Pedotransfer Function for the Brunswick Soil Hydraulic Property Model and Comparison to the van Genuchten‐Mualem Model
JO  - Water resources research
VL  - 56
IS  - 9
SN  - 1944-7973
CY  - [New York]
PB  - Wiley
M1  - FZJ-2020-04526
SP  - e2019WR026820
PY  - 2020
AB  - Modeling soil hydraulic properties requires an effective representation of capillary and noncapillary storage and conductivity. This is made possible by using physically comprehensive yet flexible soil hydraulic property models. Such a model (Brunswick [BW] model) was introduced by Weber et al. (2019, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018WR024584), and it overcomes some core deficiencies present in the widely used van Genuchten‐Mualem (VGM) model. We first compared the performance of the BW model to that of the VGM model in its ability to describe water retention and hydraulic conductivity data on a set of measurements of 402 soil samples with textures covering the entire range of classes. Second, we developed a simple transfer function to predict BW parameters based on VGM parameters. Combined with our new function, any existing pedotransfer function for the prediction of the VGM parameters can be extended to predict BW model parameters. Based on information criteria, the smaller variance of the residuals, and a 40% reduction in mean absolute error in the hydraulic conductivity over all samples, the BW model clearly outperforms VGM. This is possible as the BW model explicitly accounts for hydraulic properties of dry soils. With the new pedotransfer function developed in this study, better descriptions of water retention and hydraulic conductivities are possible. We are convinced that this will strengthen the utility of the new model and enable improved field‐scale simulations, climate change impact assessments on water, energy and nutrient fluxes, as well as crop productivity in agroecosystems by soil‐crop and land‐surface modeling. The models and the pedotransfer function are included in an R package spsh (https://cran.r‐project.org/package=spsh).
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000578452200032
DO  - DOI:10.1029/2019WR026820
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/887934
ER  -