Aplicación de modelos matemáticos para la obtención de la curva de retención de humedad del suelo

In modern agriculture the use of mathematical models is increasing to predict water and solute movement inthe vadose zone of porous media. Thus, it is needed to know the soil hydraulic properties, among those thatare the moisture content curve. This curve is obtained from various analytical models; however, they had notbeen evaluated with the Cuban soils. Furthermore, five analytical models were compared with 570 samplescollected from different soils and regions of country, in the period 1990-2003. This evaluation uses thecriteria of Square Quadratic Residuals (SQR), the variation coefficient (r2), and the standard error. As a result,the Van Genuchten model with condition m = 1-1/n shows the best adjustment between measured andestimated values, with ranges of the SQR between 0.05x10-3 and 2.86x10-3 g g-1 and r2 more than 0.92. Whenusing this model with data coming from altered or unaltered samples, appreciable variations were notobtained in the resulting curves for the tensions from 0 to 100 cm. It use to model, as well as of the estimatedparameters for each soil groups can be used in the estimation of the necessary moisture content curve by thesimulation models.