Thermal convection of soil air on hillsides

Although diffusion is usually considered to be the main transport process for volatile constituents in the unsaturated zone of soils and other surficial materials, an alternative process of thermally driven convection may be significant, especially on hillsides and over irregular bedrock. Convection in this mode is driven by buoyancy forces arising from differences in soil-air density in a temperature gradient. For bodies with sloping boundaries, the conventional Rayleigh criterion is not directly applicable, so that flow of air is possible in a wide variety of situations. Numerical simulations for several simple cases show that air convection is expected within relatively permeable materials such as sandy soils, gravel deposits, and talus on slopes.