A general form of Archie’s model for estimating bulk soil electrical conductivity

By Yongwei Fu, R. Horton, T. Ren, J. Heitman. 2021

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Abstract Electrical conductivity can be used as a surrogate to study the spatial and temporal variabilities of a number of soil properties, e.g., porosity, salinity, clay content and soil moisture. In this study, we develop a general form of Archie’s model that describes the relationship between soil electrical conductivity (σ) and volumetric water content (θ). The input parameters include θ, σ values at dry and saturated conditions (σdry and σsat), soil porosity (ϕ) and sand, silt and clay contents. A value of 2 was given to the water phase exponent (w) based on model calibration with σ and θ datasets obtained from 15 soils. The general form of Archie’s model was evaluated by comparing soil σ estimates to measured σ values from an additional 6 soils. The new model performed well by providing estimates with root mean square errors in the range of 0.008-0.399 dS m−1 and relative errors ranging from 0.7% to 29.8%. The new model is simple, easy to use and ready for further evaluation on a wide range of soil conditions.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Geophysics, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/189550c617f9f1ca4ecdfa14fe607117faee854c