Advances in the monitoring of geo-structure subjected to climate loading

The paper presents results achieved within the project MAGIC, a project funded by the European Commission under the Marie-Curie Industry Academia Partnerships and Pathways (IAPP) scheme. The project MAGIC aims to advance the state-of-the art in the monitoring of geo-structures subjected to climate loading by filling some of the gaps in current monitoring technologies. The project involves a partnership between academic and industrial partners to boost knowledge transfer and promote the development of ‘industrial’ instruments and services. The paper presents developments concerning the measurement of pore-water tension (suction in excess of 100 kPa) and the integration of geotechnical and geophysical monitoring

REAL-TIME quality check of measurements of soil water status in the vadose zone

The in-situ monitoring of soil suction and water content is important for a range of applications from civil engineering (e.g. estimation of groundwater infiltration) to agriculture (e.g. optimization of irrigation). The efficiency of field monitoring systems has recently improved thanks to the development of sensors that continuously record soil water status data and remotely transmit them through the internet. These data are, however, accessed by users only on a periodic basis, which impedes a timely detection of sensor failures. To overcome this limitation, this paper describes a method for automatically assessing the quality of suction and water content measurements in the field. The method is based on a real time comparison between field data and a reference soil-water retention curve. A tolerance box is introduced around each field data point, defined by a pair of suction and water content measurements. If the tolerance box intersects the reference soil-water retention curve, the suction and water content sensors are assumed to work correctly. Conversely, if the tolerance box falls outside the reference soil-water retention curve, at least one of the two sensors may have failed. The proposed method has been validated against measurements from five different agricultural soils confirming the efficiency of the tool in evaluating the accuracy of field data