Soil hydraulic properties determined by infiltration experiments and different heights of water pouring

Establishing the dependence of the soil hydraulic characterization carried out by an infiltration experiment on the procedure used to apply water on the confined soil surface may help to better interpret the collected data and also to develop more accurate strategies for soil hydraulic characterization. Soil was sampled at four Sicilian sites with both the Simplified Falling Head (SFH) technique and the Beerkan Estimation of Soil Transfer parameters (BEST) procedure and two heights of water application (0.03 and 1.5m). The most appropriate BEST algorithm to analyze the data was determined and the effect of the height of water pouring on the measured soil hydraulic properties was evaluated. The two BEST algorithms, i.e., BEST-slope and BEST-intercept, differed substantially given that 19 and 76 runs out of 80 were successful in the former and the latter case, respectively, and only BEST-intercept was usable for low steady state infiltration rates (is