Modeling preferential water flow and solute transport in unsaturated soil using the active region model

Preferential flow and solute transport are common processes in the unsaturated soil, in which distributions of soil water content and solute concentrations are often characterized as fractal patterns. An active region model (ARM) was recently proposed to describe the preferential flow and transport patterns. In this study, ARM governing equations were derived to model the preferential soil water flow and solute transport processes. To evaluate the ARM equations, dye infiltration experiments were conducted, in which distributions of soil water content and Cl⁻ concentration were measured. Predicted results using the ARM and the mobile–immobile region model (MIM) were compared with the measured distributions of soil water content and Cl⁻ concentration. Although both the ARM and the MIM are two-region models, they are fundamentally different in terms of treatments of the flow region. The models were evaluated based on the modeling efficiency (ME). The MIM provided relatively poor prediction results of the preferential flow and transport with negative ME values or positive ME values less than 0.4. On the contrary, predicted distributions of soil water content and Cl⁻ concentration using the ARM agreed reasonably well with the experimental data, with ME values higher than 0.8. The results indicated that the ARM successfully captured the macroscopic behavior of preferential flow and solute transport in the unsaturated soil.