A novel statistical-physical model of soil heat capacity

A b s t r a c t.The heat capacity is a key parameter affecting heat storage and transfer in soil.Therefore, in this study, we proposed a novel statistical-physical model based on concepts of specific heat, the principle of energy conservation, and configurations of mineral, organic, water, and air particles to estimate the volumetric heat capacity.The novel model does not require the choice of parameters in the equations.It was compared with measured results for soil aggregate beds and two field soils.It can be concluded that the statistical-physical model's predictability of heat capacity was suitable for all the soil specimens.The measured and statistical-physical model-predicted volumetric heat capacities increased with the increasing water content and with the decreasing aggregate size.The good agreement between the model-predicted and measured heat capacities confirmed that the model assumptions regarding the specific heats of soil components and their averaging in the proposed model were adequately established.The proposed easy-to-use and flexible model can be applied to evaluate heat capacity in response to soil management practices and land use.The heat capacities predicted by the statistical-physical model agree well with those from the traditional analytic models proposed by de Vries (1963) and Zhao et al. (2016).K e y w o r d s: heat capacity, new model, aggregate beds, field soils, validation