A STUDY ON PONDING TIME AND INFILTRATION CAPACITY DURING STEADY RAINFALL

Natural rainfall has the variation in rainfall intensity during its event. However, the various infiltration models are subjected to rainfall intensities that are higher than the infiltration capacity of the soil at a given location. Diskin and Nazimov (J. Hydrol., 172: 313-330, 1995) proposed recently the infiltration model which is a simple conceptual model and can express the relationship between rainfall intensity and ponding time.‘Ponding time’ is the period from the beginning of rainfall until the occurrence of ponding. This model also can compute the variation in the infiltration capacity for constant or variable rainfall rates. A simple conceptual model is valuable for carrying out the stormwater runoff analysis.The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ponding time and the infiltration capacity for field infiltration data measured using a rainfall simulator under steady rainfall and to evaluate the above infiltration model proposed by Diskin and Nazimov. Comparison of the model calculations with experimental data shows reasonably good for the relationship between rainfall intensity and ponding time and excellent agreement for the infiltration decay curves.