First to Fourth Weeks:

Physical Properties of Soils and Other Porous Media - Units and dimensions, definitions and basic mass-volume relationships between the solid, liquid and gaseous phases; soil texture; Stoke's Law; particle and pore size distributions; surface area; soil structure.

Soil Water Content and its Measurement - Definitions; measurement methods - gravimetric, neutron scattering, gamma attenuation; and time domain reflectometry; the role of soil water storage in the water balance; field capacity concept.

Lab #1(09/11/01) - Soil bulk density; soil water content - gravimetric, neutron probe installation and calibration; TDR demonstration.

Soil Water Retention and Potential (Hydrostatics) - The energy state of soil water; total water potential and its components; properties of water (molecular, surface tension, and capillary rise); units and calculations of potentials under equilibrium; measuring soil water potentials; soil water characteristic (retention) curves and their measurements; fitting parametric models; hysteresis.

Lab #2 (9/25/01) - Determination of SWC curves using pressure plates, flow cells, and thermocouple psychrometer, combining measurements and fitting SWC.

(Exam #1 - tentative date: Wed. 10/2)

Water Flow in Soil - Hydrodynamics: Part 1 - Laminar flow in tubes (Poiseuille's Law); Darcy's Law, conditions and states of flow; saturated flow; hydraulic conductivity and its measurement.

Lab #3 (10/9) - Measurement of saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks) in uniform and layered soil columns.

Part 2 - Unsaturated steady state flow; unsaturated hydraulic conductivity models and applications; non-steady flow; approximate solutions to infiltration (Green-Ampt, Philip); field methods for estimating soil hydraulic properties.

Lab #4 (11/6) - Infiltration experiment; application of algebraic expressions, Green-Ampt, and Philip's approximations to observed data - infiltration rates and wetting front propagation.

Exam #2 - tentative date: Monday 11/6)

Salinity and Solute Transport in Soils - convection and diffusion of solutes; breakthrough curves; convection-dispersion equation and solutions to pulse and continuous solute application; salt balance and salinity management.

Lab #5 (11/13) - Miscible displacement and breakthrough curves for a noninteracting tracer (Chloride) through a sand column; methods of data analysis and estimation of transport parameters.

Soil-Plant-Atmospheric Relations - Radiation and energy balance; evapotranspiration and its estimation; transpiration, crop coefficients, and irrigation scheduling; surface evaporation.

Soil Temperature and Heat Flow - Soil thermal properties; steady state heat flow; nonsteady heat flow; estimation of soil thermal properties.

(Final Exam - Monday, 12/13 12:00-1:50 PM)