Proceedings of the International Workshop "Characterization and Measurement of the Hydraulic Properties of Unsaturated Porous Media," Riverside, California...

Proceedings of the International Workshop "Characterization and Measurement of the Hydraulic Properties of Unsaturated Porous Media," Riverside, California, 22-24 October 1997

Edited by M. Th. van Genuchten, FJ. Leij, and L. Wu, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521. 1999. 1581 p. in two parts. $120.

Historically, detailed knowledge of soil water retention, hydraulic transport, and thermal properties was required for crop productivity and was the realm of soil physicists and agronomists. Increased process modeling of water and solute transport in soil due to increased pressure on our soil and ground water resources has heightened the demand for more accurate measurement of the soil's hydraulic properties. Coupled with this is the need to link surface soil and plant root and canopy dynamics with the atmospheric boundary layer processes to better understand the issues facing our planet. This wider interest and demand for knowledge concerning the hydraulic characterization of surface materials has brought soil scientists together with environmental engineers, ground water hydrologists, biometeorologists, and many others. This demand has shifted the spatial scale of interest beyond the field plot and the plow layer to the watershed scale and provoked landscape process modeling and prediction of water and solute flows to much greater depths-tens of meters.

Laboratory and field methods have developed slowly to grapple with the highly nonlinear soil hydraulic functions that form the basis of soil physics: soil water retention and unsaturated hydraulic conductivity curves. The pessimists...