Modeling the impacts of soil hydraulic properties on temporal stability of soil moisture under a semi-arid climate

Despite the significant spatiotemporal variability of soil moisture, the phenomenon of temporal stability of soil moisture (TS SM) has been widely observed in field studies. However, the lack of understandings of the factors that control TS SM has led to some contradictory findings about TS SM. To resolve this issue, numerical models may offer an alternative way to complement field studies by quantifying different controls on TS SM. In this study, a 1-D vadose zone model was adopted to simulate daily soil moisture contents, which were used to compute the mean relative difference (MRD) and standard deviation of relative difference (SDRD) of soil moisture. Different from recent modeling studies, a soil dataset was employed with 200 samples of correlated soil hydraulic parameters for sandy soils. Compared to the results of previous modeling studies, more reasonable patterns of MRD and SDRD that resembled field observations were produced. By varying soil hydraulic parameter values, different patterns of MRD and SDRD could also be generated, implying variations in soil hydraulic properties could partly control the patterns of MRD and SDRD. More specifically, the residual soil moisture content (Or) was found to be the primary control on MRD, mainly due to the semi-arid climate that was simulated. By fixing 0,, however, a highly nonlinear relationship emerged between MRD and the shape factor n in the van Genuchten model, which resulted in the positively skewed distributions of MRD widely observed for sandy soils in field experiments. Moreover, both the range and skewness of the distributions of MRD were affected by the range of n. In addition, with increasing n, a positive correlation between MRD and the shape factor I in the van Genuchten model was also found. The simulation results suggested that the control of soil hydraulic properties on MRD might weaken for areas under bare surface conditions or for regions with more humid climates due to elevated soil moisture contents. Therefore, the impacts of soil hydraulic properties on TS SM may vary under different climate regimes. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.