Garden with Insight v1.0 Help: Soil patch next day functions: remove eroded soil from the soil profile

After the water and wind erosion for the day has been calculated (and all other calculations have been done on the soil layers), the amount of soil eroded is taken out of the simulated soil layers.

Removal of soil is complicated by the fact that the first soil layer is always ten millimeters thick. Some portion of the top soil layer is removed, then a portion of the second layer is moved into the top layer in order to keep the top layer thickness at 10 mm. If the thickness of the second soil layer goes below 10 mm, a new soil layer is created by splitting one of the lower layers into two.

In the unlikely situation that the total soil depth (to the bottom of the lowest layer) has been reduced to 20 millimeters, no more erosion occurs. Erosion calculated from then on is stored in a "material waiting to be eroded" variable until the total soil profile thickness is again greater than 20 mm. You might note that since the actual removal of eroded soil is done after the removal of nutrients supposedly carried away in the eroded soil, the simulation might be removing some nutrients twice. This is a problem that should be fixed.

When the eroded soil is "removed" from the top soil layer, only the soil weight and the thickness of the soil layer are changed. This is because the loss of nutrients in the eroded soil was already calculated, and because the properties of the soil (like pH, CEC, etc) are assumed not to change when some of the soil is removed.

calculation of runoff and water erosion from rainfall, runoff and water erosion from irrigation, wind erosion, loss of nutrients in eroded soil
Model contents