Journal of Hydrology 575 (2019) 1011–1030

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Journal of Hydrology
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Research papers

Estimation of saturated hydraulic conductivity with pedotransfer functions: T

A review
⁎ ⁎
Yonggen Zhanga,b, , Marcel G. Schaapb,
a
Institute of Surface-Earth System Science, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, PR China
b
Department of Soil, Water and Environmental Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA

A R T I C LE I N FO A B S T R A C T

This manuscript was handled by C. Corradini, Saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks) is a singular parameter in earth system science. Ks not only governs the
Editor-in-Chief, with the assistance of Renato rate of flow of water under a hydraulic gradient as specified by the Darcy equation for saturated conditions, but
Morbidelli, Associate Editor also acts as a scaling factor in many unsaturated flow and transport applications that involve pore-size dis-
Keywords: tribution models. Without knowledge of saturated hydraulic conductivity, it would be difficult to accurately
Pedotransfer function describe the transport of water and dissolved or suspended constituents in soils and sediments, or calculate
Saturated hydraulic conductivity groundwater transport and recharge, and quantify the exchange between soils and the atmosphere. While the
Permeability determination of Ks is not especially difficult, it is expensive and (in many cases) infeasible to carry out field or
Kozeny-Carman
lab experiments for large-scale applications. Pedotransfer functions (PTFs) are a class of largely data-driven
Vadose zone
empirical models that aim to estimate Ks (and often other hydraulic quantities such as water retention char-
Soil
acteristics) from easily available data. In this review, we first briefly discuss the history of the development of the
concept of saturated hydraulic conductivity and its relation to the Kozeny-Carman (KC) equation. The KC
equation serves as a central point in this review because it determines which soil variables affect saturated flow
at the pore-scale, a domain which now can also be visited by computational fluid dynamics models. The KC
equation also provides us with a structure in which we can classify the large number of PTFs that have been
developed for estimating Ks. Datasets and statistical techniques available for PTF development are discussed, and
we also describe common metrics used to assess the accuracy and reliability of PTF estimates. The mutual
agreement of two main classes (i.e., an effective porosity KC-based and soil texture-based) of PTFs is analyzed
using a number of global maps of predicted Ks. Finally, we discuss challenges and perspectives that might lead to
PTFs with improved estimates of Ks. In particular, we suggest establishing and utilizing large and completely
independent databases to assess the accuracy and reliability of PTFs for global use, while also drawing in in-
formation from pedological and remote sensing sources.

1. Introduction characterization and prediction of these soil processes usually require

Soil plays a fundamental role in the Earth’s terrestrial biosphere by
controlling the transfer of mass and energy between land surface and
atmosphere (Amundson et al., 2015; Bittelli et al., 2015). Near-surface
soil is especially important because it regulates the local water balance
through infiltration, evapotranspiration, surface runoff, groundwater
recharge and hence has a substantial effect on regional and global land
surface water and energy balances (Montzka et al., 2017; Vereecken
et al., 2016; Verhoef and Egea, 2014). For example, nearly 60% of the
terrestrial precipitation is returned to the atmosphere through the soil-
plant-atmosphere continuum (Katul et al., 2012; Oki and Kanae, 2006),
while around half of the global biomass production and related carbon
cycle depend on soil processes (Cleveland et al., 2013). Accurate
an accurate parameterization of soil hydraulic properties (i.e., the soil
water retention curve, the unsaturated hydraulic conductivity curve,
and saturated hydraulic conductivity). In many cases, however, direct
measurement of soil hydraulic properties is time-consuming and labor
intensive, and especially impractical for large-scale applications (Dai
et al., 2013; Vereecken et al., 2010). As an alternative, soil scientists
have developed pedotransfer functions (PTFs) to estimate soil hydraulic
properties from commonly available soil information such as soil tex-
ture and bulk density.
In the past few decades, numerous PTFs have been developed for a
variety of purposes and objectives, ranging from theoretical studies to
small plot-scale empirical relations to considerable efforts that meet the
needs of regional and global-scale weather and climate modeling.

⁎
Corresponding authors at: Institute of Surface-Earth System Science, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, PR China (Y. Zhang).
E-mail addresses: ygzhang@tju.edu.cn (Y. Zhang), mschaap@email.arizona.edu (M.G. Schaap).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2019.05.058

Available online 21 May 2019

0022-1694/ © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Y. Zhang and M.G. Schaap
Fig. 1. An Excerpt of Darcy’s (1856) Appendix D in which he presents his empirical law.
Thorough reviews of the work in this field have previously been given
by Wösten et al. (2001), Pachepsky and Rawls (2004), Vereecken et al.
(2010), and Van Looy et al. (2017). Wösten et al. (2001) reviewed PTFs
to estimate soil hydraulic parameters, including soil water retention
and hydraulic conductivity characteristics. Vereecken et al. (2010)
specifically reviewed PTFs to estimate van Genuchten-Mualem
(Mualem, 1976; van Genuchten, 1980) soil hydraulic properties. Van
Looy et al. (2017) reviewed PTFs in different disciplines of the earth
system science, including PTFs for water, solute, heat, and biogeo-
chemical soil processes.
Previous reviews did not focus primarily on the soil saturated hy-
draulic conductivity (Ks), which is a simple, yet critical, soil property.
Saturated hydraulic conductivity is needed to calculate flow rates in
saturated soils using Darcy’s equation. However, Ks is also important in
the Richards equation for unsaturated flow where it is needed to scale
relative hydraulic conductivity predicted by the pore-scale models of
Burdine (1953), Mualem (1976), and Alexander and Skaggs (1987) into
unsaturated hydraulic conductivity. In a broader sense, our ability to
estimate (un)saturated flow is crucial to many Earth Systems Science
applications, including oil and gas recovery from geological reservoirs,
the protection of natural groundwater resources, the remediation of
polluted soil and groundwater, and the long-term stewardship of waste
disposal sites.
The main thrust of this paper is to review the state-of-the-art PTFs
for estimating saturated hydraulic conductivity in soil science and
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Journal of Hydrology 575 (2019) 1011–1030
hydrology. In order to provide a comprehensive overview, we will first
provide a brief historical context of saturated hydraulic conductivity.
This overview starts with the empirical Darcy equation for saturated
flow and proceeds to the physically-based Kozeny-Carman equation
(see Kozeny, 1927; Carman, 1956, 1937). The Kozeny-Carman (KC)
equation subsequently provides us with a convenient framework to
briefly discuss computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods, which are
able to simulate saturated flow networks at the pore-scale. The flow
fields computed with CFD allow us to compute saturated hydraulic
conductivity (and other quantities) in a mechanistic way from observed
or specified pore-structure. The KC equation, as well as CFD methods,
subsequently provide us with insight which soil variables should affect
saturated hydraulic conductivity, which we will use as a guide to group
the many existing empirical PTFs according to their predictors. We will
subsequently discuss datasets and statistical techniques available for
PTF development and evaluate a number of PTFs comprehensively.
Accuracy and reliability of PTFs are analyzed based on commonly used
criteria. Key challenges for the development and using PTFs are finally
identified by evaluating a selection of widely-used PTFs on a global
data set.
It is noted that throughout most of the review, we will use the term
“saturated hydraulic conductivity” which is abbreviated by Ks with
units of length over time. However, it should be pointed out that other
disciplines such as civil engineering designates this quantity as per-
meability (Sanchez-Vila et al., 2006), whereas soil sciences, geology,
Y. Zhang and M.G. Schaap
and petroleum engineering use permeability to indicate the (more
fundamental) concept of intrinsic permeability k, which is related to Ks as
follows:
Ks = kρg μ (1)
where ρ , g , and μ are fluid density, acceleration of gravity, and dynamic
viscosity, respectively. This expression indicates that Ks depends on
both fluid properties (the density and dynamic viscosity) and the in-
trinsic, fluid-independent, permeability of the porous medium. The
units of intrinsic permeability are squared length units, with one
“darcy” unit being equivalent to a permeability of
9.869233 × 10−13 m2 and defined in terms of standard atmospheric
pressure and unit viscosity and flow rate.
2. A brief history of saturated hydraulic conductivity and
estimation from PTFs
The concept of saturated hydraulic conductivity originated in the
middle of the 19′th century with Henry Darcy (1856). As an inspector
for roads and bridges in the French city of Dijon, he wrote a publication
that mainly dealt with the distribution of water through the city’s
aqueducts. However, in his Appendix D, Darcy (1856) also reported on
a series of experiments on the flow of water through sand “filters”
(Fig. 1). Darcy stated that the flow (“ecoulement” in French) is pro-
portional to the pressure difference and inversely proportional to the
thickness of the filter, which allowed him to establish the original
equation:
k×s
Q= [H + e]
e (2)
where Q is the flow (in volume over time); s and e are the area and
thickness of the filter, respectively; H is the thickness of the layer of
water above the filter (the bottom of the filter is assumed to be at at-
mospheric pressure). The variable k, is (translated) “a coefficient de-
pendent on the nature of the sand” with material-specific values shown
in the last column of the table contained in Fig. 1.
After eliminating the area s, and for the simplified case of vertical
flow, Darcy’s law is now commonly written in terms of flux (q, with
length over time units) and hydraulic gradient, ΔH Δz :
ΔH
q = −Ks
Δz (3)
where ΔH is the difference between water levels imposed on the inflow
and outflow (Darcy’s H + e), along a column of length Δz (Darcy’s e),
all expressed in length units. Darcy’s k is now written as Ks, and in-
terpreted as the saturated hydraulic conductivity (units: length over
time) for a homogeneous permeable porous medium that is fully per-
meated with water under laminar flow conditions. The negative sign is
needed to make the direction of the flow consistent with the coordinate
system. Saturated hydraulic conductivity in Darcy’s law is equivalent to
thermal conductivity in Fourier’s law, diffusion coefficient in Fick’s law,
and electrical conductivity in Ohm’s low, all of which are conceptually
similar and mathematically identical relationships.
The first application of saturated hydraulic conductivity to soil
process modeling was proposed by Richardson (1922) in his book
“Weather Prediction by Numerical Process” (Fig. 2a, see the landscape
grids for velocity and pressure calculation in Fig. 2b; also refer to Dani
Or: 2018 Walter B. Langbein Lecture), which was lost during the First
World War, but was accidentally found and published in 1922. In this
book, Richardson was attempting to solve the challenges of re-
presentation of land surface and water flux at the soil surface. Ri-
chardson’s pioneering notion to combine the hydrological processes of
land surface and climate modeling not only marks the beginning of the
numerical weather forecasting, but also permitted Richardson to derive
what is now known as the Richards equation in 1917 (see the equation
in Fig. 2c), long before Lorenzo A. Richards published his work in 1931
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Journal of Hydrology 575 (2019) 1011–1030
(Richards, 1931). In the present, the “Richards” equation for vertical
unsaturated flow along axis z is commonly given as:
∂θ ∂ ⎡ ∂h
= Ks Kr ⎛ − 1⎞ ⎤
∂t ∂z ⎢
⎣ ⎝ ∂z ⎠⎥⎦ (4)
where Ks scales the relative unsaturated hydraulic conductivity, Kr,
with the latter varying orders of magnitude as a function of matric
potential or moisture content. Ks is therefore also an important quantity
for unsaturated flow (for example, see Mualem (1976), and van
Genuchten (1980)), though there are some complexities if macropore
flow is involved (for example, see Schaap and van Genuchten, 2006,
and references therein).
Motivated by an empirical “Übelstand” (roughly: “nuisance”) in
agricultural soil water balances, Kozeny (1927) was able to provide a
theoretical basis to hydraulic conductivity by relating intrinsic perme-
ability to pore volume and pore shape. This approach was later mod-
ified by Carman (1937, 1956) into what is now known as the Kozeny-
Carman equation, in which intrinsic permeability is written in terms of
particle diameter d (Kozeny, 1927; Carman, 1937):
d 2φ3
k=C
(1 − φ)2 (5)
where φ is the porosity and C is a constant of proportionality. Alter-
natively, intrinsic permeability can also be defined in terms of hydraulic
radius, RH (Carman, 1937, see also Berryman, 1985; Berryman and
Blair, 1986; Blair et al., 1996):
φRH2
k=
GT 2 (6)
where porosity (φ ) clearly provides the volume available to flow. The
hydraulic radius RH can be defined as pore volume over pore-solid
surface area, which means that RH is one-half of the physical radius of a
cylindrical pore. Tortuosity (T ) and the pore shape factor (G ) account
for the lengthening of the flow-path and non-cylindrical pores, re-
spectively.
It is interesting to note here that the definitions by Eqs. (5) and (6)
are somewhat complementary: the first equation defines permeability
in terms of particle phase (particle diameter), whereas the second
equation relies on a length scale of the pore space (hydraulic radius).
Particle diameter is easy to measure, but hydraulic radius typically
relies on analysis of two-dimensional or three-dimensional images ob-
tained of the pore-space (e.g., Blair et al., 1996; Schaap and Lebron,
2001). Both approaches are interesting, however, because they relate
intrinsic permeability to pore volume, shape and size, and the com-
plexity of the flow path, all of which have a distinct physical inter-
pretation. We also note here that with Eq. (5), Carman established a
pedotransfer function avant-la-lettre in 1937.
Relying on measurements, Bear (1972) and later Freeze and Cherry
(1979) summarized the values of hydraulic conductivity and intrinsic
permeability for aquifer, soil, and rocks, with saturated soil hydraulic
conductivity ranging between 102 and 10−12 cm/s from textures ran-
ging between clean gravel to unweathered clay (see Table 1). Campbell
(1974) listed a table of saturated hydraulic conductivity for five types of
soils and derived an equation to estimate unsaturated hydraulic con-
ductivity. It is noted that soil water retention parameters and saturated
hydraulic conductivity were provided together, because of the re-
quirement to derive unsaturated soil hydraulic conductivity for soil
modeling. Clapp and Hornberger (1978) improved a soil water reten-
tion model and provided a lookup table of water retention parameters
and saturated hydraulic conductivity for 11 USDA soil classes using
1446 soil samples from Holtan (1968). Cosby et al. (1984) derived re-
tention parameters and saturated hydraulic conductivity by utilizing
1448 samples from Holtan (1968) and Rawls et al. (1976). Both the
lookup tables from Clapp and Hornberger (1978) and Cosby et al.
(1984) (see Table 2) have been extensively used in the Community
Y. Zhang and M.G. Schaap Journal of Hydrology 575 (2019) 1011–1030

Fig. 2. (a) Lewis Frey Richardson (1881–1953). (b) Richardson’s map of meteorological weather stations and landscape grid for velocity (white) and pressure (dark)
calculations: frontispiece of Weather Prediction by Numerical Process by Richardson (Cambridge University, 1922). (c) The Richardson-Richards equation for
unsaturated soil on Page 108 from Richardson’s book. Adapted from Dani Or: 2018 Walter B. Langbein Lecture and revised based on Richardson’s book.

Table 1 easy-to-measure and/or widely available soil properties (e.g., soil tex-
The range of saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks) for different geological ture and bulk density from soil survey). The development of PTFs
mediums. Modified from Bear (1972) and Freeze and Cherry (1979). therefore bridges the gap between the available soil data and required
Soil type Ks (cm/s) soil information and facilitates the extensive application of water flow,
energy transition, and solute transport at the field and large scales (Van
Unconsolidated Deposits Looy et al., 2017).
Gravel 1 × 10−1−1 × 102
Clean sand 5 × 10−4−1
Silty sand 1 × 10−5−1 × 10−1 3. Predictors of saturated hydraulic conductivity
Silt, loess 1 × 10−7−5 × 10−3
Glacial till 1 × 10−10−1 × 10−4 The Kozeny-Carman expression for permeability (Equation (6)) in-
Unweathered marine clay 1 × 10−10−1 × 10−7
dicates that soil saturated hydraulic conductivity, Ks, depends on par-
Rocks ticle size (i.e., soil constituents) and soil porosity (i.e., soil voids), hy-
Shale 1 × 10−11−1 × 10−7
draulic radius, and a pore shape factor. In Section 3.1, we use
Unfractured metamorphic and igneous rocks 1 × 10−12−1 × 10−8
Sandstone 1 × 10−8−5 × 10−4 computational fluid dynamics simulations on artificially generated
Limestone and dolomite 1 × 10−7−5 × 10−4 medium to show how these factors affect the permeability from a me-
Fractured metamorphic and igneous rocks 1 × 10−6−1 × 10−2 chanistic viewpoint. However, while insightful, the pore-scale imaging
process and the computational simulations are expensive and not
practical for most applications. Section 3.2 will therefore focus on
Land Model (CLM) and general circulation models (GCM) (see the land empirical PTFs that estimate permeability from readily measured
surface models in Chen and Dudhia, 2001; Dai et al., 2003; Kowalczyk quantities, such as soil particle size and soil porosity.
et al., 2006; Niu et al., 2011; Oleson et al., 2013).
To characterize many of the previous efforts, the term pedotransfer
3.1. Image analysis and computational fluid dynamics
function (PTF) was finally introduced by Bouma (1989). In general,
PTFs aim to estimate difficult to obtain soil hydraulic, thermal char-
Recent advances in both observational and computational techni-
acteristics, solute transport coefficients, or other soil properties, from
ques make it now possible to obtain the three-dimensional structure of

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Y. Zhang and M.G. Schaap Journal of Hydrology 575 (2019) 1011–1030

Table 2
Number of soil samples and Ks values of USDA soil textural classes for the class PTFs of selected publications (unit: cm/d).
Texture class Clapp and Hornberger (1978) Rawls et al. (1982) Cosby et al. (1984) Carsel and Parrish (1988) Zhang and Schaap (2017)*

Number Ks Number Ks Number Ks Number Ks Number Ks

Clay 140 11.09 291 1.44 148 8.41 1177 4.80 92 14.75
Silty clay 441 8.93 127 2.16 43 11.62 1002 0.48 29 9.61
Sandy clay 19 18.72 45 2.88 16 62.38 74 2.88 12 11.35
Clay loam 262 21.17 366 5.52 147 21.14 1317 6.24 147 7.06
Silty clay loam 147 14.69 689 3.60 325 17.58 1882 1.68 92 11.11
Sandy clay loam 80 54.43 498 10.32 104 38.46 610 31.44 179 13.23
Loam 125 60.05 383 16.32 103 29.18 1991 24.96 262 13.34
Silt loam 384 62.21 1206 31.68 394 24.27 3050 10.80 332 18.47
Sandy loam 204 299.52 666 62.16 124 45.19 2835 106.08 487 37.45
Silt – – – – – – 115 6.00 6 43.75
Loamy sand 30 1350.72 338 146.64 30 121.63 881 350.16 205 108.20
Sand 13 1520.64 762 504.00 14 402.76 803 712.80 308 642.95
Total 1845 5371 1448 15,737 2151

Note. All results are transformed into the same unit: cm/d.
* Several samples are located at the exact boundary of two classes and are therefore included in both classes, leading to the total number of soil samples that
exceed the number of soil samples in Rosetta, i.e., 2134.

the pore-space and conduct simulations of fluid flow at the pore-scale,
allowing us to derive permeability numerically. Several studies have
carried out three-dimensional imaging of porous medium with
Computed Tomography (CT, Ketcham and Carlson, 2001; Wildenschild
and Sheppard, 2013), followed by segmentation of the gray-scale vo-
lumes into pore-space and particle space (Houston et al., 2013; Iassonov
et al., 2009; Iassonov and Tuller, 2010; Kaestner et al., 2008; Kulkarni
et al., 2012). The segmented pore-structure can subsequently be used
for image analysis (Berryman and Blair, 1986; Blair et al., 1996; Schaap
and Lebron, 2001) or be used in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
to yield estimates of permeability (e.g., Hilpert, 2011; Spanne et al.,
1994; Sukop et al., 2013; Zhou et al., 2018). Drawbacks of the CT
imaging-segmentation-CFD approach is that it is expensive (as it re-
quires CT imaging equipment, as well as substantial amounts of com-
putation time), and that the quality of the simulations and derived
permeability depends on the quality of the image data and the chosen
segmentation algorithm (Iassonov et al., 2009; Larsen, 2018).
As an example of the CFD approach, we provide here some results
obtained with a series of Lattice-Boltzmann simulations (e.g. Camargo
et al., 2012; Keehm et al., 2004; Martys and Chen, 1996; Sukop et al.,
2013; Zhang et al., 2005) to obtain the pore-scale flow network in a
synthetic porous medium generated with a particle packing algorithm
(Baranau and Tallarek, 2014). To this end, we initially packed 150
particles of a nominal diameter of 100 pixels into a box of 5003 voxels
(volume elements) using the PackingGeneration software package
(Baranov, 2017). The volume was subsequently cropped to a centered
400 × 400 × 400 voxel volume to eliminate boundary effects (as par-
ticles cannot be packed across the boundary of the volume). A single-
fluid Lattice Boltzmann (LB) simulation with pressure boundaries
(Schaap et al., 2007) was subsequently run on the resulting pore
structure to obtain the pore-scale flow network and velocities. Twelve
more simulations were run, in which we replaced single particles by
eight half-diameter ones of 50-pixel diameter, thus decreasing
“average” particle size while maintaining total particle volume. Speci-
fically, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 45, 60, 75, 90, 120, and 150 ‘large’ par-
ticles were thus replaced by smaller spheres, with the latter consisting
1200 smaller particles. Total in-house computation time amounted to
about 1500 ‘CPU’ hours, which would cost approximately $300 on an
equivalent Amazon EC2 system (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
on-demand/, a1.2xlarge platform, retrieved on February 26, 2019).
Fig. 3 provides a depiction of packing of 1200 small particles (all
large particles converted, top left in Fig. 3), the midpoint (75 large
particles remaining, 75 particles converted into 600 smaller ones), and
packing of large particles only (top right in Fig. 3). The figure also
shows the resulting flow fields, indicating that the highest flow-rates
are reached in the volume with the largest particles (top right). Fol-
lowing Hilpert (2011), permeability for each of the volumes can be
computed from the pressure difference between inlet and outlet (top
and bottom), volume mean fluid velocity (along the pressure gradient),
the length of the flow domain (400 pixels), and the LB and physical
fluid viscosity along with some LB-topology constants. A physical voxel
size would subsequently provide a “real” permeability, but was arbi-
trarily set to 1 in this example. The tortuosity of the flow field can be
computed as:
〈 |U | 〉
T=
〈uz 〉 (7)
where |U | is the magnitude of the velocity, 〈 〉 is the volume mean, 〈uz 〉 is
the volume mean velocity along the pressure gradient.
Fig. 4 provides a plot of permeability versus relative particle size (by
mass, computed as 1- B/2L0, with L0 the initial number of large parti-
cles and B the number of particles broken up into smaller ones). The
figure shows that the simulated permeability (red line with dots) gen-
erally increases with particle size. From the dimensional analysis of the
units of permeability (square of length) and Eq. (5), it follows that
permeability should increase with the square of a characteristic length
scale of the porous medium. This relation is indicated by the dashed
black line, which is referenced to the simulation at a particle size of 1.
However, the figure shows that it is not entirely correct to use particle
size as a proxy for the length scale. Even though the permeability at a
particle size of 0.5 is roughly a quarter of that at a particle size of 1.0 (as
expected from Eq. (5)), the region in-between exhibits lower-than-ex-
pected permeability (i.e., the red line is under the dashed line). The
deviation is not caused by variation in the porosity or tortuosity; these
values are almost constant as shown in the figure.
It turns out that hydraulic radius (as used in Eq. (6)) provides a
better relation with permeability, as shown by the green line with solid
diamonds in Fig. 4. Hydraulic radius (RH) was here computed as the
ratio of porosity and surface area, i.e., the ratio of pore voxels and pore-
solid vertices of the voxel-related volume. This implies that the hy-
draulic radius is a more appropriate length scale to characterize the
porous medium than is particle size. This also means that -at least for
these synthetic samples- there is no direct relation between particle-size
and permeability, but that particle and pore arrangement is also im-
portant. Referring again to Fig. 3 it is clear that the particle packing and
flow pattern is rather “ordered” at a relative particle size at 1 (Fig. 3,
top right) and 0.5 (Fig. 3, top left), but appears to be unordered at a
particle size of 0.75 (the middle column of Fig. 3). The random packing
apparently leads to a hydraulic radius that is smaller than expected
from particle size.

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Y. Zhang and M.G. Schaap Journal of Hydrology 575 (2019) 1011–1030

Fig. 3. Top left: a volume with 1200 small

particles. Middle: 75 large and 600 small
particles. Top right: 150 large particles.
Bottom row: Lattice Boltzmann simulated
flow fields and relative speeds (blue for low
speed, yellow and red for mid and high
speeds, respectively). (For interpretation of
the references to color in this figure legend,
the reader is referred to the web version of
this article.)

Finally, Fig. 4 also shows an evaluation of the Kozeny-Carman
equation using data obtained from the generated volumes. For tortu-
osity, we assume the value of 1.25, which is the mean value obtained
with the LB simulations. It is interesting to note here that porosity-
based tortuosity estimates by Koponen et al. (1996), Yu et al. (2003)
and other approaches (see Larsen, 2018), all yield much higher values
(1.5 to 2) than computed with Eq. (7). A possible explanation is that the
Koponen et al. (1996) and Yu et al. (2003) approaches rely on the total
porosity, whereas Eq. (7) relies on the velocity distribution in the actual
flow field. This approach accounts for the possibility that there is no (or
low) flow in some parts of the pore-space, which then does not con-
tribute to tortuosity. We point out here that this is reminiscent of the
concept of effective porosity that is discussed in Section 3.1. The only
unknown that remains is the geometry factor, G (Eq. (4)); by setting G
equal to 1 , the Kozeny-Carman formulation according to Eq. (6) yields
2
a near-exact match with the simulated LB data.
The above example shows that CFD can provide a detailed insight
into the actual flow patterns inside the porous medium, provided that
the pore-structure can somehow be obtained with CT imaging, statis-
tical reconstruction (Keehm et al., 2004; Yeong and Torquato, 1998), or
particle packing (as done here). Such analyses are computationally in-
tensive, but provide detailed data about the relations between particle
arrangement, particle-size, pore topology (see Vogel et al., 2005) and
permeability. Evident here, and relevant for this review, is that the
relation between particle-size and permeability is more complicated
than a simple linear relation and that particle ordering and pore net-
work effects play a role as well.
3.2. Empirical approaches
A number of recent studies have endeavored to identify the factors
controlling Ks in an empirical, data-driven way. For example, using the
HYPRES (Hydraulic Properties of European Soil) soil hydraulic data-
base, Lilly et al. (2008) found that soil textural and structural in-
formation are the most useful input for deriving PTFs to estimate Ks.
Papanicolaou et al. (2015) found that soil texture is the dominant factor
in determining Ks values for high sand content (> 15%) soils and low
agricultural activities, while bulk density dominated low sand content
and high agricultural practices at three hillslopes in southeast Iowa.
Jarvis et al. (2013) and Jorda et al. (2015) found that Ks are strongly
depended on soil bulk density and land use instead of soil texture for
the top soils (< 0.3 m depth) based on published literature.
In order to prevent too much tedious enumeration in discussing the
empirical estimation of Ks, we have grouped available methods in three

6 6
Porosity, Tortuosity, Hydraulic Radius (length)

Hydraulic Radius
Square of particle size
5 Simulated k (from LBM) 5
Kozeny−Carman prediction
Permeability (length2)

Tortuosity
4 Porosity 4

3 3

2 2

1 1

0 0
0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
Relative Particle Size (−)
Fig. 4. Permeability (values on the left axis), and porosity, tortuosity, hydraulic radius (values on the right axis) versus relative particle size (see text for details).
Simulated k is based on Lattice-Boltzmann method.

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Y. Zhang and M.G. Schaap
general classes. Porosity based approaches, particle size-based ap-
proaches and PTFs that use soil structural information. The first two
classes parallel the KC formulations according to Eqs. (5) and (6), re-
spectively. The third class (soil structural effects), deals with PTFs
where the effect of porosity and particle size is less clear and the effects
of soil inhomogeneity due to structure or macropores are apparent.
3.2.1. Estimation using soil porosity
Eqs. (5) and (6) clearly show the dominating role of soil porosity in
permeability, not only because it sets the volume available to saturated
flow, but also because together with surface area it defines the hy-
draulic radius. Several of the parameters in Eqs. (5) and (6) are difficult
to measure which motivated Ahuja et al. (1984, 1989) to simplify the
KC equation (Carman, 1956) by utilizing the concept of effective por-
osity, φe , as:
Ks = Bφe n (8)
where B and n are empirically determined constants. Effective porosity
is defined here as the difference between the total porosity and water
content at 330 cm pressure head. Effective porosity is therefore related
to soil water retention and involves the volume fraction of large pores
that would contribute to saturated flow in a meaningful way. In this
context, it is interesting to note that the water content at the 330 cm
pressure head value is (at least in the USA) considered to be field ca-
pacity (i.e., the pressure head where gravity drainage of unsaturated
soil conceptually ceases). Moisture content at 330 cm pressure head is
also routinely measured in US soil surveys (National Cooperative Soil
Survey, 2017). Ahuja et al. (1989) showed that there was good agree-
ment between estimated Ks from Eq. (8) and experimental data by
utilizing independent validation data, considering the large uncertainty
in measured Ks values. Further details regarding the empirical constant
B and n can be found in Appendix A1. Rawls et al. (1998) improved the
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Journal of Hydrology 575 (2019) 1011–1030
Fig. 5. Relationship between bulk density
and soil OC content in NCSS (National
Cooperative Soil Survey, 2017) dataset. (a)
The scatter points of all dataset used in
NCSS; red represents high data density, blue
low density. (b) Average bulk density and
corresponding average soil OC contents
shown in (a); red line indicates 95% con-
fidence intervals. (For interpretation of the
references to color in this figure legend, the
reader is referred to the web version of this
article.)
estimation of Ks by including the Brooks-Corey pore-size distribution
index (Brooks and Corey, 1964) into Eq. (8) (Eq. A(2) in the Appendix).
Timlin et al. (1999) found that further improvements were possible
when the Brooks-Corey pore-size distribution index was included in the
coefficient B (Appendix A3), although the improvement was not sig-
nificant compared with the results from Eq. (8). Spychalski et al. (2007)
also modified the coefficients of Eq. (8) and obtained a model that
performed better than published PTFs when evaluated on independent
data obtained from the UNSODA data set.
Although estimation of Ks based on effective porosity from Eq. (8) is
satisfying, accurate estimation of effective porosity is still difficult.
Sobieraj et al. (2001) evaluated the performance of nine published PTFs
and found estimates were not reliable for the La Cuenca catchment in
Peru, which in turn made them unsuitable for modeling stormflow
events. They suggested that an improved estimation of effective por-
osity should be pursued. Revil & Cathles (1999) used the classical Ko-
zeny-Carman according to Eq. (6) and derived a new equation very
similar to Eq. (5) for pure shale and clay-free sands by including the
electrical formation factor, separating pore throat from total porosity
and effective from total hydraulic radius. The resulting model captured
the effective porosity and an effective hydraulic radius and was able to
estimate permeability over 11 orders of magnitude for a wide variety of
materials obtained from the literature; the model error was within one
order of magnitude.
Bulk density can also be used to provide information about soil
porosity, as well as soil compaction (Rabot et al., 2018). Generally, bulk
density is shown to be negatively correlated with Ks. High bulk density
indicates tightly packed soils, with low porosities and presumably low
hydraulic radii, which should result in low Ks values.
Hierarchical PTFs such as Schaap et al. (2001), and Zhang et al.
(2018) have shown that including bulk density as an additional pre-
dictor can increase R2 between estimated and measured Ks values from
Y. Zhang and M.G. Schaap
around 0.45 by employing only soil textural percentages as predictors
to 0.55 based on the same calibrated Rosetta dataset. PTFs that use bulk
density as predictors include Rawls and Brakensiek (1985), Vereecken
et al. (1990), Campbell and Shiozawa (1992), Jabro (1992), Schaap
et al. (2001, 2004), Jarvis et al. (2002), Li et al. (2007), Aimrun and
Amin (2009), Twarakavi et al. (2009), Merdun (2010), Tóth et al.
(2015), Yang et al. (2018), among others.
Bulk density is shown to have a negative correlation with soil OC
content (Heuscher et al., 2005; Zacharias and Wessolek, 2007) and
therefore soil OC content has been employed to estimate bulk density in
previous works, such as Adams (1973) and Rawls (1983). A scatter plot
between soil bulk density and OC content for 49,855 soil samples from
the NCSS (National Cooperative Soil Survey, 2017) dataset is provided
in Fig. 5a. By averaging soil bulk density and OC content within ranges,
there is a clear decreasing relationship between these two quantities
(Fig. 5b), with narrow 95% confidence intervals, which shows that
there is indeed an inverse relationship between bulk density and soil OC
content. OC content as a predictor to estimate Ks includes work by
Vereecken et al. (1990), Tamari et al. (1996), Wösten (1997), Wösten
et al. (1999), Weynants et al. (2009), among others.
Wagner et al. (2001) compared several PTFs by utilizing OC content
and those PTFs without OC as predictors based on an independent 63
German soil horizons and found that Wösten (1997)’s work by in-
cluding OC content as a predictor performed the best. However, Wagner
et al. (2001) suggested that the evaluation dataset is too small, and the
conclusions might not be general enough, and therefore larger dataset is
suggested to be used for the comparison. Nemes et al. (2005) found a
negative correlation between soil organic carbon content and Ks based
on four PTFs, including Vereecken et al. (1990), Wösten et al. (1999,
2001), and their newly developed PTFs from effective porosity by uti-
lizing Ahuja et al. (1984)’s approach. Based on three soil databases,
they found results that contradict findings by Mbagwu and Auerswald
(1999) and Lado et al. (2004). An explanation may be that the latter
authors used repacked soil columns for their experiments, whereas
Nemes et al. (2005) used undisturbed soil cores. Nemes et al. (2005)
suggested that soil OC content retains water well and allows less water
to flow, thus reducing Ks values. In addition, larger cracks and clods will
be replaced by more aggregated material with increasing OC content,
leading to more tortuous and thin pathways for water to go.
In summary, models that rely on effective porosity are promising,
but empirical studies discussed above also indicate that the effects of
bulk density and organic carbon affect the estimation of Ks. Further
work is needed to gauge whether these are local or study-specific effects
or whether they can be generalized to a global scale.
3.2.2. Soil textural information
Soil textural information includes soil textural classes, soil textural
percentages (sand, silt, clay portions), and soil particle size distribution.
Since soil texture is easy to measure, it is used in almost all PTFs that
estimate Ks. Unfortunately, different countries or regions use different
soil textural classification systems, such that defined by the USDA (The
United States Department of Agriculture), or the European HYPRES
(Hydraulic Properties of European Soil), SSEW (Soil Survey of England
and Wales) from UK, and AISNE (French texture triangle of the Aisne
region soil survey) from France. Currently, the USDA classification is
the most extensively used system in the literature, with soil particle size
of sand, silt, and clay being within 0.05 and 2.00 mm, 0.002 and
0.05 mm, and less than 0.002 mm, respectively.
Probably the simplest method to express the relation between soil
texture and Ks is by averaging observed Ks values for each textural class
(e.g. “sandy loam”, “silty clay”, etc.). This leads to simple tables of
values (and perhaps standard deviations) also known as “class PTFs”,
such as those published by Clapp and Hornberger (1978), Cosby et al.
(1984), and Rosetta3 (Zhang and Schaap, 2017). Several of these
lookup tables are listed in Table 2 and indicate that there are sub-
stantial differences among estimates for the same class; differences of
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Journal of Hydrology 575 (2019) 1011–1030
half an order of magnitude are not uncommon. The lookup tables of
Rawls et al. (1982) and Carsel and Parrish (1988) are widely used in
soil science and vadose zone hydrology.
Although class PTFs are straightforward and can be used even when
hand-classifying soil texture ‘in the field’, a disadvantage is that satu-
rated hydraulic conductivity changes discontinuously across class
boundaries (e.g., for sandy loam the Rawls et al., 1982 class PTF pro-
vides 62 cm/day, but for the adjacent loam class it lists 16 cm/day in
Table 2). When class PTFs are used, small changes in the actual sand,
silt, and clay percentages may yield rather large changes in Ks, which
may not be appropriate for some applications.
The discontinuity problem of class PTFs can be alleviated by de-
riving linear/nonlinear regression models that predict Ks from con-
tinuously varying variables that characterize the particle size distribu-
tion. The most commonly used variables to express the relationship
between particle size distribution and Ks are sand, silt, and clay per-
centages (technically only two of these should be sufficient). Other
quantities used to express particle size distribution include geometric
mean particle diameter from Mishra et al. (1989), or the approach of
Araya and Paris (1981) and Arya et al. (1999). In the latter approach,
the pore size distribution is estimated from particle size distribution.
Saturated (and also unsaturated) hydraulic conductivity is subsequently
computed using the Hagen-Poiseuille law. Using a small subset of the
UNSODA data set (Leij et al., 1996; Nemes et al., 2001), Arya et al.
(1999) obtained R2 of 0.807 with an average root mean square error
(RMSE, see Section 4.3) of 0.878.
Because of the large amount of PTFs that are based on soil texture
data information, we do not list them in detail here, but we provide
some commonly used PTFs, as well as some recently developed ones in
Appendix B. Also, Table 3 indicates that substantial improvements are
possible when bulk density is included in the predictive model, showing
again the role of porosity. Here we also remind the readers that the
Lattice Boltzmann simulations in Section 3.1 indicated an imperfect
relation between particle size and Ks – even for an idealized medium.
While important, soil texture data is likely an insufficient predictor for
Ks. This may become especially relevant for highly structured soil, as
was suggested by Wösten et al. (2001) and some tropical soils in which
stable clay aggregates tend to act as a sand fraction (Tomasella and
Hodnett, 1997).
3.2.3. Soil structure information
Soil structure pertains to the spatial arrangement of both soil voids
and solid constituents, i.e., soil particles and organic matter (Dexter,
1988). Soil structure can be used to reflect biological activity (earth-
worms and roots), abiotic factors (wetting-drying and freezing-thawing
process), or the effects of tillage practices and farmland operations in
the soil. Romero-Ruiz et al. (2018) suggested that traditionally mea-
sured bulk soil properties, such as bulk density or porosity, provide very
limited soil information regarding soil structure. Fig. 6 shows three
different soils with similar soil texture and bulk density but with major
differences in soil structure. Due to differences in soil structure, dif-
ferent preferential flow pathways exist which may result in significantly
different soil hydraulic conductivity for the three panels in Fig. 6.
O’neal (1949) is probably the first to suggest to use soil structure to
predict Ks, by stating:
“In general, it would seem that structure is the most significant factor in
evaluating permeability. But permeability cannot be correctly evaluated
on the basis of type of structure alone… In some section, heavy textures
go along with slow permeability, and light textures with rapid perme-
ability. But, in the main, texture alone not a reliable clue….Permeability
cannot be evaluated on the basis of one characteristic alone”.
O’Neal (1949, 1952) further suggested that the most critical step to
determine permeability is to determine the structural type, followed by
the relative size of the horizontal and vertical cracks and fissures and
other factors. He also suggested that climate condition is like to be a
Y. Zhang and M.G. Schaap Journal of Hydrology 575 (2019) 1011–1030

Table 3
Overview of the PTFs used to estimate Ks. Evaluated quantities, including the mean error (ME), root mean squared error (RMSE), coefficient of determination (R2),
are from corresponding literature based on validation dataset unless otherwise stated. These quantities are calculated based on log10(Ks) and the unit of is cm/day,
unless otherwise noted herein.
Sources Database/Location No. of samplesa Method Predictorsb RMSE ME R2

Cosby et al. (1984)c United States 1448 linear regression SSC 0.839 ∼ 0.872
Ahuja et al. (1989)c,d Pima clay loam, etc. 473 regression soil effective porosity 0.613 0.669
Vereecken et al. (1990) Belgium 127 linear regression PCA of texture, OC, BD, 0.262
Schaap and Leij (1998a) UNSODA 315 neural network SSC 0.840
Schaap and Leij (1998a) UNSODA 315 neural network SSC, BD 0.775
Schaap and Leij (1998a) UNSODA 315 neural network SSC, BD, θ33 0.720
Schaap and Leij (1998a) UNSODA 315 neural network SSC, BD, θ10, θ33 0.713
Wösten et al. (1999)c HYPRES 1139 linear regression SSC, BD, OC, T/S 0.190
Schaap et al. (2001)e ROSETTA 1306 neural network Textural class 0.739 −0.001 0.427
Schaap et al. (2001)e ROSETTA 1306 neural network SSC 0.717 −0.001 0.461
Schaap et al. (2001)e ROSETTA 1306 neural network SSC, BD 0.666 0.000 0.535
Schaap et al. (2001)e ROSETTA 1306 neural network SSC, BD, θ33 0.586 −0.004 0.640
Schaap et al. (2001)e ROSETTA 1306 neural network SSC, BD, θ33θ1500 0.581 −0.002 0.647
Li et al. (2007) Fengqiu, China 36 linear regression SSC, BD, OC 0.58 ∼ 0.74
Lilly et al. (2008) HYPRES 502 regression tree Textural class, ped size class, T/S 0.951
Weynants et al. (2009) Belgium 136 linear regression SSC, BD, OC 0.250
Wang et al. (2012) Loess Plateau, China 382 linear regression SSC, BD, OC, altitude 0.400 0.010 0.400
Jorda et al. (2015) 85 articles 353 regression tree Land use, BD, tension seq, textural class 0.390f
Jorda et al. (2015) 85 articles 353 regression tree Land use, BD, tension seq, textural class 0.150 g
Tóth et al. (2015) EU-HYDIh 3206 regression tree Modified FAO texture class, T/S 1.36 0.13
Tóth et al. (2015) EU-HYDI 2669 regression tree Modified FAO texture class, T/S, OC 1.05 0
Tóth et al. (2015) EU-HYDI 3206 regression tree Texture class, T/S 1.39 −0.10
Tóth et al. (2015) EU-HYDI 2628 regression tree SSC, T/S, OC 1.06 −0.01
Tóth et al. (2015) EU-HYDI 401 linear regression SSC, T/S, pH, CEC 0.90 −0.10
Zhang and Schaap (2017)i ROSETTA 1306 neural network Textural class 0.739 0.001 0.424
Zhang and Schaap (2017) ROSETTA 1306 neural network SSC 0.733 0.002 0.437
Zhang and Schaap (2017) ROSETTA 1306 neural network SSC, BD 0.681 0.001 0.514
Zhang and Schaap (2017) ROSETTA 1306 neural network SSC, BD, θ33 0.610 0.005 0.610
Zhang and Schaap (2017) ROSETTA 1306 neural network SSC, BD, θ33, θ1500 0.612 0.004 0.608
Zhang et al. (2018)i ROSETTA 1306 neural network Textural class 0.739 0.001 0.424
Zhang et al. (2018) ROSETTA 1306 neural network SSC 0.7336 0.0037 0.436
Zhang et al. (2018) ROSETTA 1306 neural network SSC, BD 0.6815 0.0030 0.513
Zhang et al. (2018) ROSETTA 1306 neural network SSC, BD, θ33 0.6134 0.0055 0.606
Zhang et al. (2018) ROSETTA 1306 neural network SSC, BD, θ33, θ1500 0.6152 0.0054 0.604

a
This is the total number of model development, including calibration and validation data.
b
Abbreviations of predictors: SSC: sand, silt, clay. BD: bulk density. OC: organic carbon content. PCA: principal component analysis. θ10: water content at 10 kPa.
θ33: water content at 33 kPa. θ1500: water content at 1500 kPa. T/S: a topsoil/subsoil distinction. Tension seq: direction of tension sequence, i.e., from dry to wet or
from wet to dry. Textural class: USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) soil textural class, unless otherwise stated. FAO: Food and Agriculture Organization
of the United Nations.
c
Only calibration quantity was found.
d
The unit is cm/hour.
e
Validation results are not provided, and model performance was based on the overall dataset because the bootstrap procedure ensured robust models that
provided similar results for calibration and validation
f
Result is from 10-fold cross validation; the unit is mm/h.
g
Result is from source-wise cross validation; the unit is mm/h.
h
EU-HYDI: European Hydropedological Data Inventory.
i
Model performance was based on the entire dataset, because bootstrapping was not applied to this PTF.

useful indicator of soil structure development, as also indicated by
Tomasella and Hodnett (1997). However, soil structural effects on Ks
have not received widespread attention and recognition in the estima-
tion of Ks. McKeague et al. (1982) suggested that high Ks values were
predominantly controlled by soil biopores based on 78 soil horizons
from North America. We note here that the Ks for the clay textural class
is higher than other classes for several of the class-PTFs listed in
Table 2. This may point to the effects of soil structure causing the Ks of
fine textures (e.g., clay) to be higher than some textures with more
coarser particles. Work that investigates the effects of soil structure on
Ks includes Wang et al. (1985), Coen and Wang (1989), Hollis and
Woods (1989), Griffiths et al. (1999), and Lilly (2000), and Gamie and
De Smedt (2018).
Predictors described in Sections 3.1 and 3.2 have been widely used
to predict Ks. However, with the exception of Lilly et al. (2008), soil
structure is usually missing in most PTFs. The main reason for this is
that soil structure (e.g., the size, shape, quantity, and continuity) are
generally less well recorded, difficult to quantify, and expensive to
measure, although structures such as the plant roots and visible pores,
are often documented in field descriptions (Vereecken et al., 2010).
Quantification of this property and standardization of measurement
techniques will help to derive continuous PTFs by including soil
structure as input, the same as the other quantitative predictors, such as
soil texture (Lilly and Lin, 2004), which will be essential in quantifying
large-scale fluxes and climate in the application of land surface mod-
eling and global climate modeling.
We also point out that there are (at least) some conceptual simila-
rities between the structured soils displayed in Fig. 6 and the CFD si-
mulations in Fig. 3. Provided that relevant macro and micro-pore re-
presentations of structured soil can be obtained (see Larsen, 2018), it
may be possible to also use CFD to resolve the effect of soil structure on
saturated flow in soils and other dual porosity domains (e.g., see Sukop
et al., 2013).

1019
Y. Zhang and M.G. Schaap
Fig. 6. Schematic illustration of soil structure along a transect. Each subgraph indicates a different soil structure: (a) Homogeneous soil. (b) The same soil with
secondary structure from biological activity. (c) Soil structure from (b) but damaged by compaction. From Romero‐Ruiz et al. (2018).
4. Datasets and statistical techniques available for PTF
development
4.1. Calibration and evaluation data
PTF development typically aims to estimate difficult-to-measure soil
properties by establishing relations between accessible input data and
estimands. In order to achieve this, the PTF developer must have access
to data sets that contain both observed hydraulic data as well as the
predictors. The requirements that these data sets need to meet depends
on the objectives being pursued. If the aim is merely to identify which
variables affect Ks (e.g., in our numerical example in Section 3.1), dif-
ferent data may be needed than in an effort where the primary objective
is to develop a PTF that is representative for a population of soils. In the
former case, a small data set with limited variability may suffice, but in
the latter case, a much larger dataset would be needed to cover the
variability relevant for a population of soils. This is especially important
when data-driven approaches (e.g., artificial neural networks, as well as
some more traditional statistical techniques) are used to develop PTFs.
In a hypothesis-driven approach (e.g., the Kozeny-Carman model as
modified by Ahuja et al., 1984), the model and its input variables are
known a priori and model coefficients are obtained in a calibration
procedure. In a data-driven approach, however, the model, its coeffi-
cients as well as the relevant input variables are found in the calibration
(or ‘training’) procedure. This requires that the calibration data set is
representative (and covers all the variability) of the soils to which the
model will be applied.
The authors know of few large databases that were established with
the primary objective of PTF development. Most large databases that
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Journal of Hydrology 575 (2019) 1011–1030
are available (e.g. UNSODA 2.0, Nemes et al., 2001; HYPRES, Wösten,
2000; and Grenoble soil catalog (GRIZZLY, Haverkamp et al., 1997))
were assembled from literature searches or other data-gathering efforts.
As a result, the large databases often contain data that “happen to be
available” without a guarantee that the data are representative for a
target population of soils. In many cases, the availability of hydraulic
properties is the limiting factor with, in the experience of the authors,
an overrepresentation of sandy soils, presumably because hydraulic
measurements are easier in these soils. Large pedological databases
(such as NCSS and WoSIS) are more representative of the global po-
pulation of soils but are of somewhat limited use for PTF development
because of limited retention data and the unavailability of observed Ks
values. Rahmati et al. (2018) recently published soil water infiltration
global database (SWIG), containing 5023 infiltration curves with a
subset of 1896 Ks dataset from 54 different countries with broad cov-
erage of soil types and climate regions. These datasets are valuable for
the development and evaluation of PTFs for saturated hydraulic con-
ductivity. However, as was pointed out by Wösten et al. (2001),
Pachepsky and Rawls (2004), and Vereecken et al. (2010) that soil
structural properties, support scale, and other soil information are also
critical for the development of PTFs and this information is usually
missing from most databases.
The set of data used for PTF development is often much smaller than
the independent national datasets or worldwide collections of soil
survey data, such as the NCSS (National Cooperative Soil Survey, 2017)
and WoSIS (Batjes et al., 2017) that are useful for PTF evaluation. This
can be problematic because different calibration databases lead to
systematically different PTFs (Schaap and Leij, 1998b). Although the
combined dataset had a larger support and resulted in the Rosetta PTF
Y. Zhang and M.G. Schaap
Fig. 7. Soil dataset in USDA soil textural triangle. (a) Rosetta dataset. (b) NCSS dataset. (c) WoSIS dataset. (d) Second layer (5–15 cm) of SoilGrid 1 km dataset. Red
color represents high density, blue low density. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this
article.)
(Schaap et al., 2001), there is no guarantee that this model is “uni-
versal” in a global sense. Evidence for this appears in Fig. 7a which
shows that the textural distribution of Rosetta calibration dataset is
significantly different from the distribution of NCSS and WoSIS datasets
(Fig. 7b and c, respectively). Sandy soils are well represented in Rosetta
database, while silty clay loam soils have higher densities in the NCSS
dataset, and the frequencies of silty clay loam, sandy soils are high in
WoSIS dataset.
A related problem is that, although they are georeferenced, the
comprehensive NCSS and WoSIS databases cannot provide the soil
properties at any arbitrary global location. Additional geospatial tech-
niques are needed to produce gridded maps of soil properties, such as
SoilGrids (Hengl et al., 2014) and Global Soil Dataset for ESMs (GSDE,
Shangguan et al., 2014). Even though SoilGrids relies on data from the
NCSS and WoSIS datasets, Fig. 7d indicates that its textural distribution
of the 1 km2 data is more limited than either of those databases: ex-
treme silt and clay soil samples are missing. This effect is found for all
seven layers of SoilGrids data set. The possible explanation for the
discrepancy is that the kriging interpolation that was used by Hengl
et al. (2014) smoothed out the extreme values of the original point
dataset. A less likely competing explanation is that loam soils are more
common globally than represented by the NCSS and WoSIS data.
The implication of differences in the distribution among develop-
ment and evaluation datasets is that PTF estimates are not necessarily
representative of the true global distribution of soil texture, and other
relevant variables. This may produce a bias for practical applications at
both pedon and global scales. Care must be taken when using PTFs in a
different environment compared with the conditions of PTF develop-
ment (Schaap and Leij, 1998a).
4.2. Statistical techniques used to develop PTFs
A wide variety of statistical or mathematical techniques is available
to establish the relationship between predictors (texture, density,
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Journal of Hydrology 575 (2019) 1011–1030
organic carbon content) and estimand (Ks). Because of their general
empirical nature, the methods available to derive PTFs are extremely
diverse. For a detailed overview, we refer to Van Looy et al. (2017),
who reviewed a variety of the available methods that have been
(widely) used to establish PTFs, including lookup table, regression
techniques, artificial neural networks, support vector machines, k-
nearest neighbor methods, decision/regression trees, and the random
forest method. There is still a demand to develop and apply new sta-
tistical techniques based on existing or newly obtained databases. Many
statistical packages, such as the open-source programming language R
and open source software libraries such as Google’s TensorFlow, allow
the relationship between input and output data to be mined with in-
creased efficiency.
Advanced techniques also bring along the temptation to increase
model complexity, which may be able to find patterns in data that are
hidden to simple models. However, more complex models usually re-
quire more parameters, which may lead to overfitting problems. In
these cases, model calibration latches on to noise in the calibration data
(e.g., see Fig. 4 in, Schaap and Bouten, 1996). The resultant model may
perform surprisingly well on the calibration data, but poorly on in-
dependent data (because noise or other data artifacts were incorporated
in the model). Splitting the dataset into calibration and validation is
useful for determining whether the model is overfitted by using cali-
bration dataset for fitting and validation dataset for testing; most sta-
tistical packages now have facilities to ensure proper model general-
ization. In addition, advanced model selection criteria, such as AIC,
AICc, BIC, and KIC (e.g. Ye et al., 2008) can be used to rank and select
models that provide an optimal balance between predictive capabilities
and model complexity (Hastie et al., 2001; Ye et al., 2008).
Finally, Wösten et al. (2001) and Minasny and Hartemink (2011)
suggest the importance of reliable data rather than more complex
models, since most PTFs were developed using a data-driven approach
and therefore are heavily dependent on high-quality and reliable da-
tasets. Accurate measurement of soil hydraulic conductivity is probably
Y. Zhang and M.G. Schaap
the most important factor that controls the accuracy and reliability of
PTFs. The authors would also like to stress that all data that were used
for the development should be published along with the PTFs. Although
open data-repositories are currently more or less a requirement for
publication in many journals and data used for PTF development is
available, this was not the case for some models that were established
several decades ago. Several PTFs that remain in widespread use have a
data provenance that is either uncertain or hard or impossible to trace.
4.3. Accuracy and reliability of PTFs
When considering the use of PTFs, several straightforward but cri-
tical questions can be raised: should a new PTF specific for a population
of soils be developed or should one (or more) PTFs be selected from the
literature? If so, which ones? What is the accuracy of the PTFs? Are
predictions by PTFs reliable?
To answer these questions, the differences between estimated and
measured values must be quantified. The term accuracy in this regard is
used to quantify the correspondence between estimated and measured
values during PTF calibration, whereas reliability is used to determine
the correspondence between estimates and measurements on in-
dependent data (i.e., data not used for PTF calibration). This latter step
is often called validation which can be done independently from cali-
bration or be integrated into the calibration procedure using techniques
such as k-fold cross-validation, bootstrap, leave-one-out cross-valida-
tion, and the Jackknife (Hastie et al., 2001).
The accuracy of PTFs varies considerably; the reason for the varia-
bility may result from the data and methodology used for PTF devel-
opment. A PTF can make accurate estimates for calibration data, but
estimates may not be reliable when the PTF is applied to independent
data, especially when the characteristics of the input data differ sig-
nificantly from the calibration data. The accuracy of estimation can
serve as benchmark values for reliability assessment because it is un-
likely that a PTF will perform better on data that was not used for ca-
libration. Apart from the fact that the distribution of input data may
differ from that of the calibration data, the reliability of PTFs may fur-
ther depend on factors that were not considered as predictors, such as
soil characteristics, climate conditions, landscape features, and geo-
graphical regions of the soils. For example, PTFs developed for soils in
temperate climate regions may produce significant errors for tropical
soils (Minasny and Hartemink, 2011).
Donatelli et al. (2004) and Schaap (2004) have comprehensively
reviewed various criteria for assessing the accuracy and reliability of
PTFs. Among them, the most commonly used indicators for evaluating
model performance are probably root mean square error (RMSE), mean
error (ME), and coefficient of determination (R2). The RMSE is defined
as
N
1 States. However, Cosby et al. (1984) provided only calibration results
RMSE =
N
∑ [log10 (Ki′) − log10 (Ki)]2
i=1 (9)
where Ki and Ki′ indicate measured and estimated saturated hydraulic
conductivity Ks. The subscript s in Ks was removed for brevity; N is the
number of measurement for Ks.
The ME is used to assess systematic bias of estimations relative to
the measurements of Ks, defined as
N are not from any data in the same studies from calibration dataset
1
ME =
N
∑ [log10 (Ki′) − log10 (Ki)]
i=1 (10)
ME is negative value when the PTF underestimates Ks on average,
positive if overestimation. Log-10 transformations are used here be-
cause Ks can vary several orders of magnitude (e.g., Table 2). Un-
transformed use of Ks would yield error metrics that are biased to high-
conductivity soils. Because of the log-10 transformations, the RMSE and
ME values are dimensionless (since log(a) − log(b) = log(a b) ).
R2 is defined as
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Journal of Hydrology 575 (2019) 1011–1030
N
∑ [log10 (Ki ) − log10 (K ′i )]2
i=1
R2 = 1 −
N
∑ [log10 (Ki ) − log10 (K )]2
i=1 (11)
where K is the average of K .
Table 3 provides the error metrics for a selection of PTFs found in
the literature for which these are available. Here, reliability results
(validation values) are shown if both accuracy (calibration values) and
reliability (validation values) quantities are listed in the original lit-
erature. We found that most publications listed both calibration and
validation results and few showed only calibration results. The number
of soil samples used to develop PTFs is also listed and ideally should be
large and representative for the soils to which the PTFs is being applied.
Overall, the RMSE values vary considerably among PTFs shown in
Table 3, and range from 0.53 to 1.39 from PTFs respectively from Li
et al. (2007) and Tóth et al. (2015). However, in general, we cannot
conclude that the PTF in Li et al. (2007) will outperform the PTF of Tóth
et al. (2015). This is because Li et al. (2007) only used 36 samples from
a small area in China (Fengqui county) for calibration and validation.
By contrast, Tóth et al. (2015) used a significantly larger number of soil
samples (3206, from the European Hydropedological Data Inventory,
EU-HYDI), with a much wider soil coverage in continental scales. This
assessment is confirmed by Wang et al. (2012), who validated pub-
lished PTFs (Rosetta, Schaap et al., 2001; Wösten et al., 1999; Li et al.,
2007), and site-specific PTFs (based 252 soil samples) developed for the
Loess Plateau of China. By utilizing 130 additional samples, they found
that R2 for the site-specific PTF, Rosetta, Wösten et al. (1999) were
0.400, 0.305, 0.272, respectively, while the value for Li et al. (2007)
was 0.001, indicating no correlation between estimated Ks and mea-
sured data, although the data used to develop the Li et al. (2007) PTF
were also from China.
ME values were provided only in Schaap et al. (2001), Tóth et al.
(2015), Zhang and Schaap (2017) and Zhang et al. (2018). ME values
range from −0.1 to 0.13 in the work of Tóth et al. (2015), while Schaap
et al. (2001), Zhang and Schaap (2017) and Zhang et al. (2018) showed
that ME values range from −0.004 to 0.0055, all of which are based on
the Rosetta database. The differences between the ME values might
result from the database they used. It is also noted that positive and
negative residuals will cancel out, and the results can be misleading. A
PTF may have substantial positive and negative ME for sub-populations
of the data. To properly characterize bias in PTF estimates, it may
therefore be better to stratify the evaluation data in relevant classes
(e.g., by textural class) and calculate ME values for each.
In terms of R2, the values range from 0.150 to 0.872, which are
respectively from the work of Jorda et al. (2015) and Cosby et al.
(1984). Cosby et al. (1984) employed a large number of soil samples
(with a total of 1448) with a wide coverage from 23 states in the United
and the performance outside the calibrated dataset should be in-
vestigated. The lowest R2 value in Table 3 (0.150) is from Jorda et al.
(2015), which utilized 353 soil samples from 85 different peer-reviewed
articles, with diverse land use and soil samples being measured through
different methods and devices. However, it is worth noting that Jorda
et al. (2015) used a different validation method called “source-wise
cross validation”, which indicated that the dataset used for validation
within the same sampling loop. Since no single location was included in
more than one study from the peer-reviewed articles collected in Jorda
et al. (2015), this work guaranteed the soil samples from the same study
will not be included in calibration and validation dataset simulta-
neously, which is stricter than the commonly used K-fold cross-vali-
dation and bootstrapping methods. The latter methods split the data set
into calibration and validation, with the possibility of correlated data in
calibration and validation datasets. When tested using 10-fold cross
validation in Jorda et al. (2015), R2 was increased to 0.39, which
Y. Zhang and M.G. Schaap
suggested that K-fold cross-validation and bootstrapping sampling
might over-estimate the predictive performance of developed PTFs, if
calibration and validation are not completely independent. These re-
sults indicate that we might be overly-optimistic about the predictive
reliability of PTFs. Likewise, Vereecken et al. (2010) suggested that the
validation of PTFs is best carried out by utilizing totally independent
dataset rather than validation based on splitting the dataset into cali-
bration and validation.
Hierarchical PTFs shown in Table 3, such as the work of Schaap
et al. (2001) with RMSE values decreased from 0.739 to 0.581 and R2
increased from 0.427 to 0.647, suggested that the performance of PTFs
can be increased with the increasing of predictors, which will facilitate
the practical applications in data-poor to data-rich situations. Similar
hierarchical PTFs were published by Schaap and Leij (1998a), Tóth
et al. (2015), Zhang and Schaap (2017) and Zhang et al. (2018).
In summary, it is problematic to compare different PTFs based on
published error metrics. Small and homogeneous databases tend to
yield better error metrics than large datasets that include significant
variability in soil types, porosity, texture, and structure. Given the in-
creased need for detailed global distribution of soil hydraulic properties
to meet a variety of modeling and evaluation goals, comprehensive
evaluation of PTFs on a consistent and well-documented database with
PTF input and observed Ks values would be both timely and useful.
5. A comparison of global estimates of saturated hydraulic
conductivity
It is currently difficult to objectively evaluate how reliable Ks esti-
mates by PTFs are at a global scale because global-scale data currently
are lacking. While large databases with substantial global coverage
such as NCSS and WoSIS contain observed retention data, they lack
observed Ks values. No definitive statements can be made which PTF (or
combination of PTFs) provides the best estimates at a global scale.
However, the relative agreement among PTFs for estimating Ks can be
tested by evaluating these on a global data set, for which we will use the
previously discussed gridded data set of Hengl et al. (2014). Two ap-
proaches are followed: an indirect approach which relies on estimated
effective porosity, and a second approach which evaluates six PTFs
directly from particle size, and other soil data.
5.1. Effective porosity
In work that is currently under review, Zhang et al. (2019) (see the
preprint version in arXiv) provided a high-resolution global map of
effective porosity by utilizing multi-model ensemble of 13 widely-used
water retention PTFs based on NCSS dataset and using the Soilgrids 10
km dataset from Hengl et al. (2014). An evaluation of NCSS data in-
dicates that the estimated effective porosity by the ensemble is more
accurate than individual PTFs that are currently being used in earth
system models. By utilizing the Ahuja PTF (1984, Eq. (8) in this study),
global maps of saturated hydraulic conductivity and the corresponding
coefficient of variation (CV) values are produced in Fig. 8. These CV
values represent the agreement among estimated Ks values derived
from effective porosity estimated from the 13 PTFs.
High Ks values in Fig. 8a are mainly found in desert regions, such as
the Sahara and Arabian deserts, and high latitude north of 50°N, such as
northeast of North America, which is likely due to high sand content in
the desert and high soil OC content at high latitudes. Low Ks values can
be found in India, southeast to the Sahara, where clay soil prevails.
However, CV values at the low Ks regions turn out to be high, with the
values in India exceeding the color scale limits used in Fig. 8b. High CV
values suggest significant disagreement of effective porosity estimated
among individual PTFs, which might help for future PTF development
that more attention should be focused on clay soils. This global map is
promising and provides a way of moving forward to estimate un-
saturated hydraulic conductivity (Mualem, 1976; van Genuchten,
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Journal of Hydrology 575 (2019) 1011–1030
1980).
5.2. Texture-based PTFs
Six soil texture-based PTFs were used to produce global maps of Ks
using the Soilgrids 1 km dataset from Hengl et al. (2014). Contrary to
the previous section, which used the Soilgrids data set indirectly
(through effective porosities estimates validated on NCSS data), this
section applies six PTFs directly to the global Soilgrids data. Four of the
six PTFs used only soil texture data (i.e., textural class or sand, silt and
clay percentages: Clapp and Hornberger (1978), Rawls et al. (1982),
Cosby et al. (1984) lookup table, Carsel and Parrish (1988)), while the
Rosetta3 model (Zhang and Schaap, 2017) also used bulk density as
input. The Weynants et al. (2009) PTF used bulk density and organic
carbon content. Some well-known PTFs were excluded from this ana-
lysis because they produced unreasonable values. For example, Wösten
et al. (1999) utilized the terms of 1/silt, log(silt), and 1/organic matter
in the equations to calculate Ks values, and we found that silt and or-
ganic matter (OM) data can be zero in the Hengl et al. (2014) data,
leading to infinite values for the estimated Ks.
Generally, there are considerable variations among Ks values esti-
mated from different PTFs. Ks values estimated by Weynants et al.
(2009) PTF (Fig. 9f) are significantly smaller than the estimates from
the other PTFs. The dataset used to develop the Weynants et al. (2009)
PTF was limited to Belgium and is therefore not representative of the
global distribution of soils. Ks values obtained from PTFs from Clapp
and Hornberger (1978), Rawls et al. (1982), Cosby et al. (1984), Carsel
and Parrish (1988) all used only soil textural information as input,
while soil bulk density information are not included, which might
produce biased results because bulk density is related to porosity as
discussed in Section 3.2. Arya et al. (1999) suggested that similarities of
soil textural data do not necessarily indicate similarities of soil hy-
draulic properties, because significant variability in bulk density and
organic matter can be present for the same texture.
Compared with the effective porosity-based ensemble model shown
in Fig. 8a, the Rosetta3 model (which uses texture and bulk density as
predictors) produces much higher Ks values in the mid- to high latitude
of the Northern Hemisphere (Fig. 9a). PTFs that use only soil textural
information produce lower Ks values in these regions. Compared with
Cosby et al. (1984) PTF, Clapp and Hornberger (1978), and Rawls et al.
(1982) PTFs, the work of Carsel and Parrish (1988) produced higher Ks
values (warm color) in Eurasia and North America. The Carsel and
Parrish (1988) PTF generated the highest Ks values in the Southern
Hemisphere, especially in Australia and South America.
Mean values of Ks obtained by averaging the six PTFs produce
smoothed-out results (Fig. 9g), with consequently less severe and ex-
treme values. High CV values for Ks (Fig. 9h) are found in west India,
Gabon and southeast of Ethiopia in the African continent, southeast of
Brazil, Iowa and Missouri states in the US, and some areas in Canada
and Siberia. High CV values suggest significant different estimates ob-
tained from different PTFs and might serve as a reference to conduct
future PTF improvement.
6. Challenges and perspectives for PTFs to estimate saturated
hydraulic conductivity
In this review, we have introduced the history, predictors, and
statistical techniques for PTF development of saturated hydraulic con-
ductivity, and summarized the accuracy and reliability of existing PTFs.
Some issues and areas that might improve the PTF development have
been highlighted. Here we summarize the challenges and perspectives
for further improving PTFs to estimate saturated hydraulic con-
ductivity.
Y. Zhang and M.G. Schaap
Fig. 8. Global maps of (a) mean values and (b) coefficients of variation (CV) of log10(Ks) estimated from effect porosity (macroporosity) in 10 km resolution from
overall 13-PTF ensemble model employed in Zhang et al. (2019). Weights for different PTFs are based on the average values of 100 bootstrap replicas of optimized
weights. Calculations are based on the surface soil of SoilGrids 10 km data set (Hengl et al., 2014).
6.1. Increasing the reliability of measurement of saturated hydraulic
conductivity
There are diverse methods and devices for measuring saturated
hydraulic conductivity in laboratory and in-situ, such as constant-head
well permeameters, pressure and tension infiltrometers, single/double
ring infiltrometers, undisturbed soil core methods (Morbidelli et al.,
2017). These methods have different systematic errors and biases and
produce inconsistent and sometimes conflicting results, which should
be considered in PTF development. Standard methods, procedures, and
protocols for measuring saturated hydraulic conductivity will be ben-
eficial and improve the development of PTFs.
6.2. Including relevant predictors
We have summarized the predictors that have been extensively used
in PTF development in Section 3. For increasing the predictive power
and estimation accuracy, more materially relevant predictors should be
included. However, this requires that such predictors are available
when the PTFs are used, which may limit their general applicability due
to lack of required input data.
Considering the importance of soil structure as predictors, imaging
techniques are promising and attractive non-invasive methods to in-
vestigate the details of soil structure. These techniques may also yield
additional insight when combined with CFD methods. Commonly used
approaches include optical or electron thin-section microscopy, X-ray
tomography, gamma-ray and neutron tomography, and nuclear
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Journal of Hydrology 575 (2019) 1011–1030
magnetic resonance imaging (Rabot et al., 2018). However, there is no
unified protocol to characterize soil structure, and it is critical to
identify agents and find proxies to quantify soil structure.
Remote sensing products are revolutionary and provide valuable
information for PTF development. Employing the wealth of remote
sensing products, such as Moderate Resolution Imaging
Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Advanced Land Observing Satellite
(ALOS), sentinel-2, Landsat, MEdium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer
(MERIS), will provide information, such as the vegetation types and
dynamics, leaf area index (LAI). With further processing, these ob-
servations may yield further soil and landscape information by which
PTFs can be improved or validated.
Other useful information and possible predictors include land use,
tillage activity, soil horizon, and direction of tension sequence (dry-to-
wet or wet-to-dry), which will be beneficial to build new data infra-
structure and improve PTF development.
6.3. New statistical techniques and ensemble model
With the increasing accessibility of “big data” relevant to the soil
sciences and the breakthrough advances being developed in machine
learning, we see great opportunities in enhancing our physical under-
standing and insights, new scientific discovery, and predictive power.
Statistical techniques, such as linear regression, neural networks,
support vector machines, regression trees, and random forest, have
been widely used for the development of PTFs. Other statistical tech-
niques, such as Gaussian Process (Ju et al., 2018; Raissi et al., 2017),
Y. Zhang and M.G. Schaap Journal of Hydrology 575 (2019) 1011–1030

Fig. 9. Global map of saturated hydraulic conductivity (log10(Ks)) in 1 km resolution estimated from (a) Rosetta3 H3w model (Zhang and Schaap, 2017) by em-
ploying soil textural percentage and bulk density data as input. (b) Clapp and Hornberger (1978). (c) Rawls et al. (1982). (d) Cosby et al. (1984) lookup table. (e)
Carsel and Parrish (1988). (f) Weynants et al. (2009) models. (g) Mean values. (h) Coefficient of variation of log10(Ks) are also shown. Calculations are based on the
surface soil of SoilGrids 1 km data set (Hengl et al., 2014).

Naive Bayes Classifiers (Frank et al., 2000; Tsangaratos and Ilia, 2016),
have -to our knowledge- not been explored in PTF development and
might be worthwhile investigating. Recently developed deep learning
algorithms such as convolutional neural network (Krizhevsky et al.,
2012; Mo et al., 2019), deep neural network (Silver et al., 2016), a
currently hot topic in artificial intelligence, seem to be very promising
in this field.
Another technique that needs to be explored is multi-model en-
semble prediction. Ensemble model combines different independent
models, which are consists of various data, theory, methodology, and
model structure. Hagedorn et al. (2005) suggested that a single model
may outperform in some cases, but the overall ensemble model will be
more reliable in the long term. The overall accuracy of the ensemble
model depends much more on how individual models are combined,
i.e., by assigning proper weights of each model (Figs. 9g and h provided
unweighted ensemble values for Ks and its CV). New national and in-
ternational computing and data infrastructures facilitate the develop-
ment and evaluation of ensemble models at a global scale. In turn,
uncertainty estimates produced by ensemble models can be useful in
many stochastic applications but also point out soil types or geographic
areas that deserve more detailed attention from future PTF develop-
ment.
6.4. Data assimilation and inverse modeling
Despite the fact that extensive development of PTFs using various
predictors and more advanced machine learning methods, we should be
aware that the accuracy and reliability of Ks estimates is modest. Data
assimilation and inverse modeling are critical and valuable to improve
the estimation of Ks and moisture content by conditioning on field
observed system variables, such as moisture content and capillary
pressure (Pachepsky et al., 2014; Pan et al., 2012; Shi et al., 2015;
Zhang et al., 2016; Man et al., 2016; Ju et al., 2018; Yu et al., 2018;
Zheng et al., 2019). We suggest performing inverse modeling or data
assimilation if observed state variables are available.

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Y. Zhang and M.G. Schaap Journal of Hydrology 575 (2019) 1011–1030

6.5. Application in land surface models and global climate models
Traditional measurement and representation of Ks are carried out at
laboratory soil column scale and field scales. However, land surface
models and global climate models require the parameters in kilometer
and even larger scales, which poses challenges for the estimation by
PTFs for these applications.
Saturated hydraulic conductivity is known to vary with scales
(Pachepsky and Hill, 2017; Pachepsky and Rawls, 2004; Vereecken
et al., 2010). Neuman (1994) suggested that log permeability of porous
medium can be considered as multiscale random functions over a
continuum. He demonstrated that the logarithm of effective perme-
ability varies as a power of the characteristic length, with the latter
being treated as the support scale of a permeability test for geologic
media. The data used to develop PTFs for saturated hydraulic con-
ductivity, therefore, should be scale-consistent, e.g., all at the labora-
tory soil-column scale. Because Ks is scale dependent by nature, the
scaling effects of saturated hydraulic conductivity should be considered
in the application of PTFs used in catchment, regional, and global
scales.
It is difficult to measure Ks at kilometer-scales and even harder to
quantify the associated error and bias. The parameters, therefore,
should be evaluated and accessed by utilizing numerical experiments
such as land surface models, numerical weather forecast models, and
global climate models by quantifying the hydrological processes, ve-
getation feedbacks, surface energy, and global climate responses.
7. Conclusions
Saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks) is crucial to many Earth sys-
tems science applications. Obtaining this soil property heavily depends
on soil pedotransfer functions (PTFs) by utilizing easily measurable
basic soil properties. In this review, we have given an overview of the
historical background of deriving and utilizing saturated hydraulic
conductivity. By using computational fluid dynamics model based on
synthetic data, we showed how permeability (extendable to saturated
hydraulic conductivity) is affected by different predictors in pore-scale
simulations. Different predictors were systematically reviewed in the
context of the Kozeny-Carman equation in soil column scales, whereas
we emphasized soil structural information for future PTF development.
By utilizing readily available soil mapping products of basic soil prop-
erties, global maps (and associated uncertainty) of saturated hydraulic
conductivity were obtained. We highlighted that accuracy and relia-
bility of PTFs for estimating Ks should be carried out based on large and
completely independent databases. PTF development on small and
correlated databases often over-estimate the reliability of PTFs.
To improve data quality and PTF development, we suggest con-
sistent methods and protocols for measuring saturated hydraulic con-
ductivity. Given the many factors that may influence the Ks estimation,
we suggest including relevant predictors (including soil structure)
should be selected; employing new statistical techniques and ensemble
models for PTF development should be employed. Data assimilation
and inverse modeling are valuable and promising to improve the esti-
mation of Ks by conditioning on available soil state variables, such as
soil moisture content. Saturated hydraulic conductivity in large scale
simulations should be evaluated and accessed by utilizing numerical
experiments such as in land surface models and global climate models
via assessing observed state variables.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influ-
ence the work reported in this paper.
The authors declare the following financial interests/personal re-
lationships which may be considered as potential competing interests:
Acknowledgments
Yonggen Zhang thanks the National Natural Science Foundation of
China (grant 41807181); Marcel G. Schaap was supported by the USDA
National Institute of Food and Agriculture under Multistate Research
Project W3188, entitled “Soil, Water, and Environmental Physics Across
Scales”.

Appendix

Equations used to calculate saturated hydraulic conductivity (KS)

This section provides equations selected from literature to calculate Ks. The symbols for sand, silt, clay are textural percentages (%) based on
USDA soil textural classification; OC and OM are soil organic carbon content and soil organic matter content, respectively; BD is soil bulk density (g/
cm3); ϕs is soil effective porosity, which is defined as the total porosity minus field capacity (volumetric soil water content at 330 cm pressure head).
Dai et al. (2013) and the report of Guber and Pachepsky (2010) are extensively referenced in this work.

A. Estimation of Ks based on effective porosity

1) Ahuja et al. (1989)

Ks = 764.5φe 3.288 (A1)
The unit for Ks is cm/hour in Ahuja et al. (1989). If unit cm/day is used, the coefficient 746.5 will be 18,348.

2) Rawls et al. (1998)

Ks = 1930φe 3 − λ (A2)
where λ is pore size distribution index in Brooks and Corey (1964) water retention model. Eq. (A2) was originally given in Rawls et al. (1998) with
the unit of mm/hour. If unit cm/day is used, the coefficient 1930 will be 4632.

3) Timlin et al. (1999)

Ks = 2.59 × 10−4 × 100.6λφe 2.54 (A3)
Eq. (A3) was originally given with the unit of m/s. The coefficient 2.59 × 10−4 will be 2237.76 if unit cm/day is used.

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Y. Zhang and M.G. Schaap Journal of Hydrology 575 (2019) 1011–1030

4) Suleiman and Ritchie (2001)

Ks = 37.15φer 1.92 (A4)

Ks = 12302φe 3.63 (A5)

where φer is relative effective porosity, which is defined as the ratio of soil effective porosity (φe ) and field capacity. Suleiman and Ritchie (2001)
suggested that Eqs. (A4) outperformed (A5) when tested on field measured Ks.

B. Estimation of Ks based on soil texture, bulk density, etc.

(1) One independent variable to estimate Ks in Cosby et al. (1984)

Ks = 100.0153 × sand − 0.884 (B1)
The unit for Ks is inches/hour in Cosby et al. (1984). If unit cm/day is used, the equation will be
Ks = 60.96 × 100.0153 × sand − 0.884 (B2)

(2) Two independent variables to estimate Ks in Cosby et al. (1984)

Ks = 60.96 × 100.0126 × sand − 0.0064 × clay − 0.6 (B3)

(3) Wösten et al. (1999)

Ks
= exp[7.755 + 0.0352 × silt + 0.93 × topsoil − 0.967 × BD 2 − 0.000484 × clay 2 − 0.000322 × silt 2 + 0.001 silt − 0.0748 OM − 0.643 × ln(silt )
− 0.01398 × BD × clay − 0.1673 × BD × OM + 0.02986 × topsoil × clay − 0.03305 × topsoil × silt ] (B4)
where topsoil and subsoil are qualitative variables having the value of 1 or 0, respectively.

(4) Saxton and Rawls (2006)

θ33 = θ33t + [1.283(θ33t )2 − 0.374θ33t − 0.015]

θ33t = −0.251 × sand − 0.195 × clay + 0.011 × OM + 0.006(sand × OM ) − 0.027(clay × OM ) + 0.452(sand × clay ) + 0.299

θ1500 = θ1500t + (0.14 × θ1500t − 0.02)

θ1500t = −0.024 × sand + 0.487 × clay + 0.006 × OM + 0.005(sand × OM ) − 0.013(clay × OM ) + 0.068(sand × clay ) + 0.031

θS - 33 = θ(S − 33) t + (0.636θ(S − 33) t − 0.107)

θ(S − 33) t = 0.278 × sand + 0.034 × clay + 0.022 × OM − 0.018(sand × OM ) − 0.027(clay × OM ) − 0.584(sand × clay ) + 0.078

θS = θ33 + θS − 33 − 0.097 × sand + 0.043

λ = [ln(θ33) − ln(θ1500)] [ln(1500) − ln(33)]

Ks = 1930(θs − θ33 )3 − λ (B5)

It is noted that sand and clay data should use a decimal value, and OM uses percentage value. For example, the input for sand, clay, and OM is
0.88, 0.05, and 2.5 if sand, clay, and OM content is 88%, 5%, 2.5%, respectively. The output unit for Ks is mm/hour; the coefficient 1930 will be
4632 if unit cm/day is used.

(5) Weynants et al. (2009)

Ks = exp(1.9582 + 0.0308 × sand − 0.6142 × BD − 0.01566 × OC ) (B6)

(6) Schaap et al. (2001), Zhang and Schaap (2017), and Zhang et al. (2018)’s work to estimate Ks based on artificial neural networks combined with
the Bootstrap method (Efron and Tibshirani, 1993). These models contain a large number of coefficients that cannot reasonably be represented
here. The models (in python scripting language) can be downloaded from http://www.u.arizona.edu/~ygzhang/download.html.

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