The need to better understand and predict the fate and transport of water and various dissolved contaminants in tropical soils has motivated the development of theoretical models describing the basic physical and biogeochemical processes involved. This research aimed to evaluate the performance of the HYDRUS-1D software package to simulate water and potassium movement in segmented columns filled with two tropical soil types, a red-yellow Latosol (LVA) and a Nitosol (NV), during unsaturated flow conditions. The potassium transport parameters were estimated from observed solute breakthrough curves. Model performance was evaluated using several statistical criteria: maximum error, mean absolute error, root mean square standard error, coefficient of residual mass, coefficient of determination, efficiency and the Willmott agreement index. Results showed that the HYDRUS-1D model was very efficient in simulating the movement of water and potassium in the two soils.
contaminant transport; leaching; computational modeling; HYDRUS-1D
