Soil water retention characteristics of Ajay river basin

Abstract

Soil samples from Ajay river basin has been collected and analyzed for its physical properties (texture and bulk density). The water retention limits of soil at two points (i) field capacity (-33 kPa) and (ii) permanent wilting point (-1500 kPa) has been measured in laboratory. In this paper an effort has been made to estimate the soil water limits from easily available soil texture and bulk density data of Ajay river basin. Three models- Brooks-Corey (BC), Multilinear Regression (MLR) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) have been developed to estimate the soil water retention limits at the above two points. Parameters of the Brooks-Corey model has been estimated using texture and bulk density obtained from soil analysis. Multi linear regression analysis has been performed to develop regression equation using texture and bulk density as independent variables. ANN method has been applied taking texture and bulk density as input and the measured water retention as output. Comparison has been made between measured and estimated values of water retention by the above three models. It is found that the soft computing technique of ANN has given better output with minimum error with higher R2 value than BC and MLR model.