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ORIGINAL RESEARCH

A Soil Water Repellency Empirical Model

Instituto Canario de Investigaciones Agrarias (ICIA), Dep. Suelos y Riegos, Apdo. 60 La Laguna, 38200 Tenerife, Spain
^* Corresponding author (cregalad{at}icia.es).

Received 13 June 2008.

The contact angle () varies nonlinearly with the soil water content (_g) in water-repellent soils; however, a quantitative description of such a _g dependence of is still lacking. Using a dimensionality reduction technique such as dynamic factor analysis (DFA), we managed to identify two common patterns within a scattered data set of vs. _g measurements performed with the molarity of an ethanol droplet test in 16 soil samples. These two common patterns, derived from the DFA, provided the basis for calibrating a proposed empirical, three-parameter, linear model that described satisfactorily (R² > 0.89) an additional –_g data set used for model validation, from 40 soil samples with organic matter contents spanning from 110 to 650 g kg^–1. This offered both scaling and a flexible quantitative description of the soil water content dependence of water repellency.

Abbreviations: AIC, Akaike's information criterion • DFA, dynamic factor analysis • DFM, dynamic factor model • MED, molarity of an ethanol droplet • WR, water repellency