Evaluation of in-situ variation of water content and temperature due to soil-atmosphere interaction by a lysimeter test

Evaluation of the variation of water content and temperature due to soil-atmosphere interaction is very important for geotechnical and agricultural applications. An in-situ test was instrumented on basis of the developed lysimeter apparatus. The monitoring indexes in this test are volumetric water content, soil temperature, total weight of specimen, water percolation and the meteorological variables. The objective is to investigate the influence of climate changes on the soil response such as changes in water content and temperature. A numerical model based on HYDRUS-1D is also set up to analyze the interaction. Result shows that climate effects are limited to a shallow depth, which is 35 cm in this study. Moreover, comparisons between the measurements and simulations indicates the relevance of the adopted numerical approach.