Abstract. Saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ksat) is an important
soil parameter that highly depends on soil's particle size distribution
(PSD). The nature of this dependency is explored in this work in two ways,
(1) by using the information entropy as a heterogeneity parameter of the PSD
and (2) using descriptions of PSD in forms of textural triplets, different
than the usual description in terms of the triplet of sand, silt, and clay
contents. The power of this parameter, as a descriptor of lnKsat, was tested on a database larger than 19 000 soils.
Bootstrap analysis yielded coefficients of determination of up to 0.977 for
lnKsat using a triplet that combines very coarse, coarse,
medium, and fine sand as coarse particles; very fine sand, and silt as
intermediate particles; and clay as fine particles. The power of the
correlation was analysed for different textural classes and different
triplets using a bootstrap approach. Also, it is noteworthy that soils with
finer textures had worse correlations, as their hydraulic properties are not
solely dependent on soil PSD. This heterogeneity parameter can lead to new descriptions of soil PSD, other
than the usual clay, silt, and sand, that can describe better different soil
physical properties, that are texture-dependent.