Hydraulic and transport parameter assessment using column infiltration experiments

Abstract

The quality of statistical calibration of hydraulic and transport soil properties is studied for infiltration experiments in which, over a given period, tracer-contaminated water is injected into an hypothetical column filled with a homogeneous soil. The saturated hydraulic conductivity, the saturated and residual water contents, the Mualem–van Genuchten shape parameters and the longitudinal dispersivity are estimated in a Bayesian framework using the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler. The impact of the kind of measurement sets (water content, pressure inside the column, cumulative outflow and outlet solute concentration) and that of the solute injection duration is investigated by analyzing the calibrated model parameters and their confidence intervals for different scenarios. The results show that the injection period has a significant effect on the quality of the estimation, in particular, on the posterior uncertainty range of the parameters. All hydraulic and transport parameters of the investigated soil can be well estimated from the experiment using only the outlet concentration and cumulative outflow, which are measured non-intrusively. An improvement of the identifiability of the hydraulic parameters is observed when the pressure data from measurements taken inside the column are also considered in the inversion.