Interplay between Fingering Instabilities and Initial Soil Moisture in Solute Transport through the Vadose Zone
Modeling water flow and solute transport in the vadose zone is essential to understanding the fate of soil pollutants and their travel times towards groundwater bodies. It also helps design better irrigation strategies to control solute concentrations and fluxes in semiarid and arid regions. Heterog...
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| Format: | Article |
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Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
2020
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/125360 |
| _version_ | 1826189381511151616 |
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| author | Cueto-Felgueroso, Luis Suarez-Navarro, María José Fu, Xiaojing Juanes, Ruben |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Cueto-Felgueroso, Luis Suarez-Navarro, María José Fu, Xiaojing Juanes, Ruben |
| author_sort | Cueto-Felgueroso, Luis |
| collection | MIT |
| description | Modeling water flow and solute transport in the vadose zone is essential to understanding the fate of soil pollutants and their travel times towards groundwater bodies. It also helps design better irrigation strategies to control solute concentrations and fluxes in semiarid and arid regions. Heterogeneity, soil texture and wetting front instabilities determine the flow patterns and solute transport mechanisms in dry soils. When water is already present in the soil, the flow of an infiltration pulse depends on the spatial distribution of soil water and on its mobility. We present numerical simulations of passive solute transport during unstable infiltration of water into sandy soils that are prone to wetting front instability. We study the impact of the initial soil state, in terms of spatial distribution of water content, on the infiltration of a solute-rich water pulse. We generate random fields of initial moisture content with spatial structure, through multigaussian fields with prescribed correlation lengths. We characterize the patterns of water flow and solute transport, as well as the mass fluxes through the soil column. Our results indicate a strong interplay between preferential flow and channeling due to fingering and the spatial distribution of soil water at the beginning of infiltration. Fingering and initial water saturation fields have a strong effect on solute diffusion and dilution into the ambient water during infiltration, suggesting an effective separation between mobile and inmobile transport domains that are controlled by the preferential flow paths due to fingering. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T08:13:49Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/125360 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T08:13:49Z |
| publishDate | 2020 |
| publisher | Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1253602022-09-30T08:29:24Z Interplay between Fingering Instabilities and Initial Soil Moisture in Solute Transport through the Vadose Zone Cueto-Felgueroso, Luis Suarez-Navarro, María José Fu, Xiaojing Juanes, Ruben Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Modeling water flow and solute transport in the vadose zone is essential to understanding the fate of soil pollutants and their travel times towards groundwater bodies. It also helps design better irrigation strategies to control solute concentrations and fluxes in semiarid and arid regions. Heterogeneity, soil texture and wetting front instabilities determine the flow patterns and solute transport mechanisms in dry soils. When water is already present in the soil, the flow of an infiltration pulse depends on the spatial distribution of soil water and on its mobility. We present numerical simulations of passive solute transport during unstable infiltration of water into sandy soils that are prone to wetting front instability. We study the impact of the initial soil state, in terms of spatial distribution of water content, on the infiltration of a solute-rich water pulse. We generate random fields of initial moisture content with spatial structure, through multigaussian fields with prescribed correlation lengths. We characterize the patterns of water flow and solute transport, as well as the mass fluxes through the soil column. Our results indicate a strong interplay between preferential flow and channeling due to fingering and the spatial distribution of soil water at the beginning of infiltration. Fingering and initial water saturation fields have a strong effect on solute diffusion and dilution into the ambient water during infiltration, suggesting an effective separation between mobile and inmobile transport domains that are controlled by the preferential flow paths due to fingering. 2020-05-20T18:45:43Z 2020-05-20T18:45:43Z 2020-03 2020-03 2020-03-27T13:27:02Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 2073-4441 https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/125360 Cueto-Felgueroso, Luis et al. "Interplay between Fingering Instabilities and Initial Soil Moisture in Solute Transport through the Vadose Zone." Water 12, 3 (March 2020): 917 © 2020 The Authors http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/w12030917 Water Creative Commons Attribution https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ application/pdf Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute |
| spellingShingle | Cueto-Felgueroso, Luis Suarez-Navarro, María José Fu, Xiaojing Juanes, Ruben Interplay between Fingering Instabilities and Initial Soil Moisture in Solute Transport through the Vadose Zone |
| title | Interplay between Fingering Instabilities and Initial Soil Moisture in Solute Transport through the Vadose Zone |
| title_full | Interplay between Fingering Instabilities and Initial Soil Moisture in Solute Transport through the Vadose Zone |
| title_fullStr | Interplay between Fingering Instabilities and Initial Soil Moisture in Solute Transport through the Vadose Zone |
| title_full_unstemmed | Interplay between Fingering Instabilities and Initial Soil Moisture in Solute Transport through the Vadose Zone |
| title_short | Interplay between Fingering Instabilities and Initial Soil Moisture in Solute Transport through the Vadose Zone |
| title_sort | interplay between fingering instabilities and initial soil moisture in solute transport through the vadose zone |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/125360 |
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