Determination of soil hydraulic properties using magnetic resonance techniques and classical soil physics measurements

Water and solute movement as any other transport processes through soil are influenced by the hydraulic properties of the soils. The heterogeneities of the soils imply heterogeneous spatial distribution of the hydraulic properties leading to heterogeneous distribution of soil water content. This may affects the water availability for plant growth, the groundwater contamination and nutrients losses within the root zone. The measurement techniques available today for the estimation of soil hydraulic parameters do not account for the heterogeneity of the sample and treat each measurement sample as a homogeneous representative volume. On the other side natural soils contain large heterogeneities mostly in terms of inclusions of different materials. Therefore the purpose of this study is to estimate soil hydraulic properties of a heterogeneous sample by combining classical multi-step-outflow (MSO) with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) experiments. MSO experiments were performed on a sample filled with sand and sand-clay mixture in a coaxial structure. During each pressure application MRI images at 4.7 T (200 MHz) were recorded using a pure phase-encoding MRI sequence in order to provide information about the soil water content at specific locations within the coaxial sample. The recorded cumulative outflow and water content data were used as input data in the inversion of the MSO experiment. For the simulation and inversion of the MSO experiment we used the hydrological model HYDRUS-2D3D in which the initial hydraulic parameters of the two materials were estimated based on CPMG-T ₂ relaxation measurements on homogeneous sub-samples. The results show conclusively that the combination of the two MRI and MSO methods leads to a unique estimation of the hydraulic properties of two materials simultaneously.