An empirical model for the evaluation of the degree of saturation of shallow soils in relation to rainfalls

The evaluation of shallow soils water content is very important in many fields, and different hydrological models are widely applied to simulate field-scale water flow and soil water content. The degree of saturation of a shallow soil is a time-varying variable, depending on different weather conditions. In many applications, it is useful to directly correlate the soil degree of saturation to time series of rainfall amount. This paper presents a simplified empirical model, which allows for computation of the soil degree of saturation using readily available climate data on air temperature and rainfall depths. The model is tested with in situ measurements of soil water content collected at three sites in the Emilia Romagna region in northern Italy. The experimental data are compared with the results obtained from the simplified model over an observation period of almost 5 years. The model has been used to generate soil water content time series at different depths and requires a separate calibration for each depth where the degree of saturation is computed. A discussion on the model’s calibration is also carried out to clarify the model sensitivity to the different parameters and the choice of input data.