Inferring soil salinity in a drip irrigation system from multi-configuration EMI measurements using Adaptive Markov Chain Monte Carlo

Abstract

A substantial interpretation of electromagnetic induction (EMI) measurements requires quantifying optimal model parameters and uncertainty of a nonlinear inverse problem. For this purpose, an adaptive Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is used to assess multi-orientation and multi-offset EMI measurements in an agriculture field with non-saline and saline soil. In the MCMC simulations, posterior distribution was computed using Bayes rule. The electromagnetic forward model based on the full solution of Maxwell's equations was used to simulate the apparent electrical conductivity measured with the configurations of EMI instrument, the CMD mini-Explorer. The model parameters and uncertainty for the three-layered earth model are investigated by using synthetic data. Our results show that in the scenario of non-saline soil, the parameters of layer thickness are not well estimated as compared to layers electrical conductivity because layer thicknesses in the model exhibits a low sensitivity to the EMI measurements, and is hence difficult to resolve. Application of the proposed MCMC based inversion to the field measurements in a drip irrigation system demonstrate that the parameters of the model can be well estimated for the saline soil as compared to the non-saline soil, and provide useful insight about parameter uncertainty for the assessment of the model outputs.