Estimating extractable soil moisture content for Australian soils from field measurements

The amount of water that can be stored in soil and evaporated or actively used by plants is a key parameter in hydrologic models and is important for crop and pasture production. Often, the active soil moisture store is estimated from laboratory measurements of soil properties. An alternative approach, described in this paper, is to estimate the extractable soil moisture capacity from direct measurements of soil moisture content in the field. A time series of soil moisture values, over the depth of the soil, shows the actual changes in water content. The difference between the wettest and driest profiles is an estimate of the extractable soil moisture storage. We have gathered data on extractable soil water capacity for 180 locations over Australia and have compared our values with published results from the Atlas of Australian Soils (AAS), derived from profile descriptions and pedo-transfer functions. Our results show that data from the AAS provide a useful lower bound for measured extractable soil moisture storage, but of the sites examined, 42% had values >2 times those in the AAS. In part, this was because total soil depths were underestimated in the AAS results compared with the active depths from the measured data. Active depths are strongly related to vegetation type.