ALBERT

Description: Temporal stability of soil water content is an often-observed phenomenon, which characterization finds multiple applications. Climate and variability in soil properties are usually mentioned as factors of temporal stability of soil water content, but their effects are far from clear. The objective of this work was to use soil water content modeling to evaluate the effects of climate and soil hydraulic properties on the temporal stability of soil water at different measurement schedules. We selected four representative climates found in USA and simulated the multiyear soil water content dynamics for sandy loam, loam, and silty clay loam soils, all having the lognormal spatial distribution of the saturated hydraulic conductivity. The CLIMGEN and the HYDRUS6 codes were used to generate weather patterns and to simulate soil water content respectively. Four different methods were applied to select the representative location. The low probability of having the same variability of mean relative differences of soil water under different climates was found in most of the cases. The probability that the variance of mean relative differences depended on sampling frequency was generally higher than 91% for the three soils. The inter-annual difference in mean relative differences variation from short and intensive summer campaigns was highly probable for all climates and soils. The representative locations changed as climate and measurement scheduling changed, and they were less pronounced for coarse textured soils. The Representative location selection methods based solely on bias provided more consistency as compared with other methods. The temporal stability appears to be the result of the interplay between climate, soil properties, and survey protocols. One implication of this factor interaction effect on temporal stability soil water content is that a simulation study can be useful to decide on the feasibility of including a search for temporal stability-based representative locations for a specific site. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.