A MATLAB program for estimation of unsaturated hydraulic soil parameters using an infiltrometer technique

We combined an inverse routine for assessing the hydraulic soil parameters of the Campbell/Mualem model with the power series solution developed by Philip for describing one-dimensional vertical infiltration into a homogenous soil. We based the estimation routine on a proposed measurement procedure especially suitable for early-time infiltrometer experiments where the flow can be considered as one-dimensional. The routine requires input of the initial soil water content and cumulative infiltration in two experiments with different pressures at the upper boundary and/or initial conditions. An independent measurement of the soil water content at saturation may reduce the uncertainty of estimated parameters. Response surfaces of the objective function were analysed. Scenarios for various soils and conditions, using numerically generated synthetic cumulative infiltration data with normally distributed errors, show promising results for finding the true values of the optimized parameters. We also investigated the effects of measurement frequency for the cumulative infiltration and errors in water content determinations.