Gas Movement Across Scales: From CT Scan to Field.

Gas movement is important for greenhouse gas budget, plant and microorganism respiration, and soil decontamination. A preliminary experiment on variability of gas diffusion used intact soil cores collected along two transects in the field. X-ray computed tomography (CT) scanning was used to describe variability in porosity of these soil columns while a model based on measured soil parameters was used to predict variability of gas diffusion over a field. Multifractal parameters estimated from CT images split to groups of soil cores by their porosity distribution. The spatial pattern created by the separation between these groups was comparable to gas diffusion patterns in the field along the transects. This brings new insight on the links existing between micro-scale variability and macro-scale variability. More research is needed to confirm our findings.