USE OF GOODNESS-OF-FIT TESTS FOR CHARACTERIZING THE SPATIAL VARIABILITY OF SOIL PROPERTIES

Application of empirical distribution function (EDF) statistics to describe the spatial variability of soil properties is discussed. The Kolmogorov statistic (D) and the Cramer-von Mises statistics (W2) were utilized to evaluate statistically the goodness-of-fit of a hypothesized theoretical distribution function to a sample of measurements of spatially-varying soil properties. Because normal and log-normal distributions commonly have been used to describe the variability of several soil properties, a Monte Carol study was performed to determine the sample size required for selecting, with a prescribed level of confidence, between these 2 distributions. It was found that the required sample size increased with decreasing coefficient of variation.-from Authors