Effect of soil moisture on the determination of soil salinity using electromagnetic induction

摘要

Among the non-destructive techniques available for estimating soil salinity, Electromagnetic Induction (EI) is one of the most promising. A prerequisite is to correlate the soil salinity, measured in the laboratory, with the soil apparent electromagnetic conductivity (EM) measured in the field. For a given soil salinity, different values of EM are obtained for different soil moisture contents. This paper presents a method to correct the EM are obtained for different soil moisture contents. This paper presents a method to correct the EM measurements for the effect of soil moisture in the range usually encountered in irrigated soils, for a maximum depth of 2 m. The method has been tested on alluvial medium textured soils in Tunisia and in Mexico. It was applied to a set of soils in a range of salinity up to 500 mSm~(-1) and a range of soil moisture from permanent wilting point up to field capacity. It was applied to a set of soils in a range of salinity up to 500 mSm~(-1) and a range of soil moisture from permanent wilting point up to field capacity. It was shown that shown that for slightly saline soils EI was a possible way to measure soil moisture, providing the bulk salinity did not change during the experiment.