Analysis of water movement in landfill cover soils using information theory measures

The water movement in landfill cover soils is studied using the information theory measures. The volumetric soil water contents beneath landfill obtained from the field experiments, and the simulations using the Active Region Model (ARM) and the continuum soil model are used in this study. ARM performs better than the continuum soil model compared to the observations. The time series of simulated soil moisture contents is encoded into a binary form with ‘zero' and ‘one' respectively representing the situations of below and above the mean soil moisture content. The information content is evaluated using the information entropy and the mean information gain. The complexity of flow patterns is quantified using the effective complexity value and the fluctuating complexity value. The result shows that the information theory measure appears to be a versatile tool of discriminating the soil moisture models. The time series of soil moisture contents simulated by ARM retains more information contents and complexities compared to those simulated by the continuum soil model.