Soil Types – Infiltration Properties

Horton parameters

We use the Horton infiltration equation for modeling infiltration in various parts of the Scalgo Live system, including the Flash Flood Map with infiltration and drainage and Core+ DynamicFlood. Each soil type in our topsoil map can have both a "High compaction" and "Low compaction" state. The compaction state of the topsoil in a given cell is determined based on the land cover, see further below. 

The table below lists the Horton parameters for the soil types in the SCALGO Live topsoil map in their different states.

Table: Horton parameters for the generalized soil types used in SCALGO Live; infiltration rates given in mm/hr. The values were chosen based an evaluation including the following sources:

Dyhr, A. S., & Lindbæk, K. W. (2021). Sammenligning af kurvenummermetoden og Hortons model. Bachelor’s thesis, DTU.

Gregory, J.H., Dukes, M. D., Jones, P. H., & Miller, G. L. (2006). Effect of urban soil compaction on infiltration rate. Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, 61 (3) 117-124.

Kotlar, A. M., de Jong van Lier, Q., Andersen, H. E., Nørgaard, T., & Iversen, B. v. (2020). Quantification of macropore flow in Danish soils using near-saturated hydraulic properties.  Geoderma, 375. 

Parnas, F. E. Å., Abdalla, E. M. H., & Muthanna, T. M. (2021). Evaluating three commonly used infiltration methods for permeable surfaces in urban areas using the SWMM and STORM. Hydrology Research, 52(1), 160–175. 

Rossman, L. A., & Simon, M. A. (2022). Storm Water Management Model User’s Manual Version 5.2. 

Grouping into high/low compaction

The land cover type of a given location decides whether we use the high or low compaction Horton parameters for that location, the table below details how we map each land cover type to a compaction degree.

Table: Soil compaction degrees assigned to different land cover types.