STOCHASTIC ANALYSIS OF UNSATURATED FLOW WITH THE NORMAL DISTRIBUTION OF SOIL HYDRAULIC CONDUCTIVITY

Stochastic approaches are useful to quantitatively describe transport behavior over large temporal and spatial scales while accounting for the influence of small-scale variabilities. Numerous solutions have been developed for unsatu-rated soil water flow based on the lognormal distribution of soil hydraulic conductivity. To our knowledge, no available stochastic solutions for unsaturated flow have been derived on the basis of the normal distribution of hydraulic conductivity. In this paper, stochastic solutions were developed for unsaturated flow by assuming the normal distribution of saturated hydraulic conductivity ( K,). Under the assumption that soil hydraulic properties are second-order stationary, analytical expressions for capillary tension head variance (σh2) and effective hydraulic conductivity (Kii*) in stratified soils were derived using the perturbation method. The dependence of σh2 and K," on soil variability and mean flow variables (the mean capillary tension head and its temporal and sp