Solute and sediment transport at laboratory and field scale: Contributions of J.-Y. Parlange

Abstract

[1] We explore selected aspects of J.-Y. Parlange's contributions to hydrological transport of solutes and sediments, including both the laboratory and field scales. At the laboratory scale, he provided numerous approximations for solute transport accounting for effects of boundary conditions, linear and nonlinear reactions, and means to determine relevant parameters. Theory was extended to the field scale with, on the one hand, the effect of varying surface boundary conditions and, on the other, effects of soil structure heterogeneity. Soil erosion modeling, focusing on the Hairsine-Rose model, was considered in several papers. His main results, which provide highly usable approximations for grain-size class dependent sediment transport and deposition, are described. The connection between solute in the soil and that in overland flow was also investigated by Parlange. His theory on exchange of solutes between these two compartments, and subsequent movement, is presented. Both deterministic and stochastic approaches were considered, with application to microbial transport. Beyond contaminant transport, Parlange's fundamental contributions to the movement of solutes in hypersaline natural environments provided accurate predictions of vapor and liquid movement in desert, agricultural, and anthropogenic fresh-saline interfaces in porous media, providing the foundation for this area of research.

Predicting the Fate of Preferentially Moving Herbicides

“…The PFM divides the soil profile into two layers, a distribution zone near the surface layer and a conveyance zone below. These two distinct soil layers were observed previously in the profile of soils with preferential pathways (Steenhuis et al, 1994; Ritsema and Dekker, 1995; de Rooij and de Vries, 1996; Barry et al, 2013; Liu et al, 2018). The distribution zone behaves like a first‐order reservoir, with an exponential loss of solutes to the conveyance zone (Steenhuis et al, 1994, 2001).…”

Chemistry and evolution of desert ephemeral stream runoff

“…The diffusion approach assumes that chemical constituents are transferred from soil into runoff in a diffusion mechanism, and ignoring the effect of rainfall (Wallach and van Genuchten, 1990;Wallach, 1991). In general, these approaches can be fitted to experimental data by calibrating one or more unknown parameters so it remains unclear how multiple processes interact to facilitate chemical transport between soil and runoff (Barry et al, 2013). A recently developed approach (Gao et al, 2004(Gao et al, , 2005Walter et al, 2007) produced from merging the two previous approaches as the rainfall-driven transport of chemical constituents from the mixing layer into runoff, and the diffusion-driven transport from deeper soil layers into the mixing layer and infiltration.…”

Fully integrated modeling of surface‐subsurface solute transport and the effect of dispersion in tracer hydrograph separation

“…[] states that modeling surface‐subsurface solute exchange is difficult due to an incomplete physical understanding of complex solute dynamics under rainfall‐runoff conditions. Numerous conceptualizations to represent mass flux between the surface and subsurface in numerical models have been developed, although no single conceptualization has been shown to apply under all conditions [ Sharpley et al ., ; Shi et al ., ; Barry et al ., ]. In a traditional subsurface (groundwater) code, boundary conditions are applied to allow solutes to enter or exit the model domain.…”