SCALING METHODS IN SOIL PHYSICS

Authors: Pachepsky, Yakov; RADCLIFFE, DAVID - UNIVERSITY OF GA; SELIM, H - LOUISIANNA STATE U.

Submitted to: CRC Press
Publication Type: Book / Chapter
Publication Acceptance Date: 9/30/2002
Publication Date: 3/19/2003
Citation: PACHEPSKY, Y.A., RADCLIFFE, D.E., SELIM, H.M. SCALING METHODS IN SOIL PHYSICS. CRC PRESS. 2003.

Interpretive Summary: Soil physical properties are needed to understand and manage natural systems spanning an extremely wide range of scales. Much of soil data are obtained from small soil samples and cores, monoliths, or small field plots, yet the goal is to reconstruct soil physical properties across fields, watersheds, and landforms, or to predict physical properties of pore surfaces and structure of pore space. This book presents a broad spectrum of techniques developed and tested to facilitate the use of soil physics data in a wide variety of soil/land/earth-related applications. Main general approaches to scaling are represented. Organization and content of all chapters is briefly described. The multiscale characterization of processes and parameters of soil physics is addressed both as a research issue of scale dependencies in soil physical properties and as practical issue of data assimilation or data fusion in environmental monitoring and prediction. Scaling of soil physical properties is a burgeoning field responding to the increasing need in integrating chemical, biological and physical processes affecting soil quality and environmental health, describing effectively the coupled fluxes of heat, moisture, gases and solutes across land surfaces, establishing appropriate soil parameters for describing the long-term fate of pollutants, interpreting various remote sensing data, delineating management zones in agricultural fields, estimating water yield and geochemical fluxes in ungauged watersheds, understanding sources and importance of diversity and patchiness in terrestrial ecosystems, and providing parameters to estimate biogeochemical trends related to climate change.

Technical Abstract: Soil physical properties are needed to understand and manage natural systems spanning an extremely wide range of scales. Much of soil data are obtained from small soil samples and cores, monoliths, or small field plots, yet the goal is to reconstruct soil physical properties across fields, watersheds, and landforms, or to predict physical properties of pore surfaces and structure of pore space. This book presents ideas, conceptual approaches, techniques and methodologies for scaling of soil physical properties. Both physics-based and empirical approaches are represented. Novel techniques based on geostatistics, artificial intelligence, wavelet transforms, fractal theory, and advances in theories of scale are included. Content of all chapters is briefly described. The multiscale characterization of processes and parameters of soil physics is addressed both as a research issue of scale dependencies in soil physical properties and as practical issue of data assimilation or data fusion in environmental monitoring and prediction. Scaling of soil physical properties is a burgeoning field responding to the increasing need in environmental modeling and prediction and to the progress in remote sensing technologies to estimate environmental parameters at large scales, in spatially intensive methods to measure indirect indicators of soil physical properties, in in situ measurement techniques to obtain small-scale soil data, and in integration of georeferenced data collected at various scales. The book presents a broad spectrum techniques developed and tested to facilitate the use of soil physics data in a wide variety of soil/land/earth-related applications.