POROUS-MEDIA WITH LINEARLY VARIABLE HYDRAULIC-PROPERTIES

The similar media concept is reformulated and extended to allow for analysis of unsaturated or saturated flow in a system of parallel nonhomogeneous one-, two-, or three-dimensional soil profiles. The resulting invariance of Richards' equation for a set of soil profiles is valid for certain initial and boundary conditions only. Simple techniques are outlined and demonstrated by examples for direct identification of scaling factors based on measured soil hydraulic data, and indirect identification based on measured dynamic characteristics of a soil water system. Suggested applications of the discussed concept are (1) the classification of soils according to the shape of their reference hydraulic properties and (2) the description of time and space variability of soil water properties for numerical modeling purposes.