Title: RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PARTICLE SIZE, AGGREGATE SIZE, PORE SIZE, AND WATER CHARACTERISTICS

Soil pore size distribution and water characteristics are important for water storage, water movement, and soil-plant interaction studies. Laboratory determinations of water characteristics and pore size distribution are time consuming and costly. Investigators have proposed many models to predict them from routinely available data. Most of the models are related to soil particle size distribution. However, they do not fit experiments well under different conditions. The objectives of this study are to determine whether some relationship between pore size distribution and particle size distribution exists for soils with different soil properties and to evaluate the influence of aggregation on the soil pore size distribution and water characteristics. After proper adjustment, the particle size, aggregate size, pore size distribution curves and the water characteristic curves were drawn on the same graph for each soil. Comparisons between pore siz