Journal of the Japanese Society of Soil Physics
Online ISSN : 2435-2497
Print ISSN : 0387-6012
Evaluating average electrical conductivity of a layered soil measured with a vertically-installed time domain reflectometry probe
Hiroyuki OCHIAIKosuke NOBORIOMasaru MIZOGUCHI
Author information
JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

2010 Volume 116 Pages 3-8

Details
Abstract

Time domain reflectometry (TDR) has been popular to measure soil water content (WC) and electri-cal conductivity (EC) both in the field and the laboratory. Although a TDR probe detects average WC and/or EC along the probe length, a limited number of researches have been reported for the accuracy of averaging WC/EC in layered soils. We investigated the accuracy of averag-ing bulk EC in layered soils. A sandy soil and a loam were uniformly packed in three layers with various WC/EC in the constant temperature incubator. Each layer has a horizontally-installed three-rod TDR probe. Two vertical two-rod TDR probes were installed across the three layers of soil from the soil surface. We found that the vertically-probes average bulk EC of three layers with −9 to +17 % of accuracies. In addition, soil texture differences affected on different results of bulk EC between vertically- and horizontally-probes. However, we do not have to think dif-ferences of electrical conductivity between the vertically-and horizontally-probes because the differences in most of situation are less than ±10 %.

Content from these authors
© 2010 Japanese Society of Soil Physics
Previous article Next article
feedback
Top