Estimation of Soil Water Retention Limits of Ajay River Basin

Soil samples from Ajay River basin have been collected and analysed for its physical properties (texture and bulk density). The water retention limits of soil at two suction points (i) field capacity (33 kPa) and (ii) permanent wilting point (1,500 kPa) have been measured in laboratory. In this paper, an effort has been made to estimate the soil water limits from easily available soil texture and bulk density data of Ajay River basin. Three models: Brooks-Corey (BC), Multilinear Regression (MLR) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN), have been developed to estimate the soil water retention limits at the above two points. Parameters of the BC model have been estimated using texture and bulk density obtained from soil analysis. Multilinear regression analysis has been performed to develop regression equation using texture and bulk density as independent variables. ANN method has been applied taking texture and bulk density as input and the measured water retention as output. Comparison has been made between measured and estimated values of water retention by the above three models. It is found that the soft computing technique of ANN has given better output with minimum error with higher R² value than BC and MLR model.