An Objective Analysis of Classification Schemes of Soils for Hydrologic Purposes.

Classification of soils is important, especially for large scale hydrologic applications. This is largely true at large spatial scales because the spatial heterogeneity of soils makes it very diffcult to be characterized through data collection. Further, the computational requirement of the models becomes increasingly difficult to satisfy. Currently, texure-based classification is used to group soils at large scale. However, texture-based classification has been shown to not necessarily be hydraulically efficient. In this study, we compare the soil texture-based classification and newly proposed soil hydraulic classification for the optimality in hydrological uses.