• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.215-223
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• 1999

Recently, measurement of soil moisture contents using TDR (time domain reflectometry) has been proven to be viable technique. The first empirical model proposed by Topp et al. (1980) has been widely used to determine moisture contents of soils from the TDR-measured dielectric constants. However, applicability of the model was limited to medium-textured soils. In this study, we investigate the applicability of the model to sandy-gravelly soils. Calibration experiments consisted of measurement on travel time of electromagnetic waveform along the parallel TDR rods inserted into samples and gravimetric determination of soil moisture contents. The experiments are performed for two sets of samples different in the length and each set consisted of seven different particle size distributions with various gavel contents. The calibration results show that the Topp equation overestimated the measured moisture content for a given dielectric constant by 3 to 8%. We therefore propose new empirical relationships valid for sandy-gravelly soils.