A New Approach to Estimate Soil Hydraulic Parameters Using Only Soil Water Retention Data

Traditional approaches for estimating soil hydraulic parameters (such as the RETC code) perform well when experimental data for both the retention curve and hydraulic conductivity function are available; however, unsaturated hydraulic conductivity data are often unavailable. The objective of this work was to develop an approach to estimate robust soil hydraulic parameters from water retention curve data alone. The proposed approach, called the Multiobjective Retention Curve Estimator (MORE), is based on the Multiobjective Shuffled Complex Evolution Metropolis (MOSCEM‐UA) algorithm and estimates an optimal parameter set by simultaneously minimizing two objective functions each representing water content and relative unsaturated hydraulic conductivity residuals. To address the lack of observed unsaturated hydraulic conductivity data, MORE transforms both predicted and observed water contents into the hydraulic conductivity space using a pore‐size distribution model (e.g., the Mualem model) and also optimizes the soil hydraulic parameters in this fictitious space. We applied MORE to two cases. In the first case, MORE was used to estimate soil parameters using only retention curve data for 12 random soils selected from the UNSODA database. While the soil hydraulic parameters estimated using RETC and MORE fit the retention curve similarly, the MORE approach consistently decreased the error in fitting unsaturated hydraulic conductivities by as much as 5% compared with RETC. The second case involved using the parameters fitted using the MORE and RETC approaches to model a field‐scale experiment. Compared with RETC, the error in predicted water contents decreased by 25% using parameters predicted by MORE. The MORE approach was shown to fit robust soil hydraulic parameters; however, the approach is relatively slower and more time consuming than RETC.