Skip to main content
ARS Home » Northeast Area » Beltsville, Maryland (BARC) » Beltsville Agricultural Research Center » Adaptive Cropping Systems Laboratory » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #362787

Research Project: Experimentally Assessing and Modeling the Impact of Climate and Management on the Resiliency of Crop-Weed-Soil Agro-Ecosystems

Location: Adaptive Cropping Systems Laboratory

Title: A new approach to simulation of infiltration and runoff in 2DSOIL

Author
item WANG, ZHUANGJI - University Of Maryland
item Timlin, Dennis
item KOUZNETSOV, MIKAIL - Ben Gurion University Of Negev
item Fleisher, David
item TULLY, KATHERINE - University Of Maryland
item LI, SANAI - Non ARS Employee
item Reddy, Vangimalla

Submitted to: BARC Poster Day
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 4/4/2019
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Soil surface water flow as runoff has been recognized as an important component in agricultural water management. Extensive studies have been developed to measure the surface runoff, while numerical methods based on kinetic wave equations or diffusive wave equations have been applied to simulate the surface water movement. For such simulations in real agricultural systems, three components should be considered, i.e., (1) the movement of water along the soil surface, (2) the accumulation of water in depressions, and (3) the water fluxes across the soil/atmosphere interface, i.e., infiltration or evaporation. The objective of this study is to develop a new surface water model within 2DSOIL that includes all the three components. Different from most finite element models of soil water flow, which simulate runoff in a simple manner by changing the boundary conditions, the subsurface flow near the soil surface follows a unified boundary condition, expressed with the Heaviside step function. The surface water flow was simulated using kinetic wave equations. The ponded water height on soil surface and the infiltration are adjusted based on the runoff flux and topography. Numerical tests based on the published experimental dataset are used to evaluate the effectiveness of this model, and numerical examples of surface water flow along a variety of topography, such as linear or piecewise linear slopes, are used to demonstrate the performance of this model. The simulations match the experimental results, and the surface water mass balance error for the numerical examples are less than 1%. A practical example of using the surface water model to estimate the runoff efficiency in a ridge-furrow water harvesting system provides additional evidence for the reliability of this model in practical problems. In conclusion, the newly developed surface water model can successfully simulate the surface water movement.