The paper entitled “A new theoretical model accounting for film flow in unsaturated porous media” by Professor Ma Jinzhu’s research team from Research School of Arid Environment & Climate Change at LZU was published on Water Resources Research(with an average impact factor of 2.948 for recent 3 years). The first author of the paper is Wang Yunqun, a doctoral student from Research School of Arid Environment & Climate Change at LZU. Professor Ma Jinzhu is the second author and the corresponding author.
The research team led by Professor Ma Jinzhu established a new significant soil hydraulic model after long-term field monitoring and experimenting research in Tengri Desert and indoor simulation and computational analysis. In the arid and semi-arid areas with low rainfall and high evaporation, soil moisture plays a more important role in environment and climate system. Soil moisture influences hydrological and agricultural process, runoff generation, drought development and many other processes. Numerical simulation is a very important means to study soil moisture and thus is widely used. However, the commonly used soil hydraulic model that presents the capillary force usually does not perform well under the condition of lower soil moisture. One parameter of soil hydraulic model is residual moisture content which lacks physical significance. The previous studies have shown that the poor performance of the commonly used soil hydraulic model might result from ignoring the process of film flow. The residual moisture content is not included in the new model’s parameter of this study, so that the movement conditions of soil moisture in the field can be effectively described under the condition of lower moisture content(lower than residual moisture content).
The research is funded by the Key Project of Chinese Ministry of Education and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). Link to the Paper http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wrcr.20390/pdf
(Translated by Ren Lina Proofread by Lawrence Xu)
