Infiltration into a Seasonally Frozen Soil and Modeling of Soil Freezing and Thawing Phenomena

The process of soil freezing and thawing is described. Soil temperature, total soil moisture content and infiltration into a frozen sandy soil were measured at an experimental field station. A new method for solving the combined mass and heat balance equations was developed. The method is based on diving the total energy into latent and sensible fractions so that the functional relationship between unfrozen water content and soil temperature is fulfilled. The model was tested against the results obtained at the experimental station.