Assessment of Capillary Rise from Shallow Groundwater by the Simulation Model SIMWASER Using Either Estimated Pedotransfer Functions or Measured Hydraulic Parameters

The performance of the water balance and crop growth model SIMWASER to estimate the water supply of a lawn by capillary rise from shallow ground water was investigated by using lysimeter measurements with a sandy and a clayey soil. Moreover the robustness of the model was evaluated by running it either with measured hydraulic soil parameters or with estimated pedotransfer functions (PTFs) derived from texture and bulk density. Simulations were performed for the years 1996–1998 with input data from the lysimeter station Berlin-Dahlem (Germany) for lysimeters containing undisturbed sandy or clayey soil monoliths, with groundwater at 135 cm depth. Simulated evapotranspiration and percolation/capillary rise were in good agreement with the measured data for all variants, while simulated soil water storage was acceptable only for the variants using hydraulic soil data based on laboratory measurements or using PTFs derived from known soil class and bulk density. PTFs based on mean total pore volume of the respective soil classes yielded soil water storages which were evidently too high; therefore they should be used with care and must be avoided at all in simulating the soil water balance of arid sites with shallow groundwater.