An affordable non-destructive method for monitoring soil parameters in large scale using electrical resistivity technique

Landslides are ruinous disaster that claim loss of many life and property. In order to develop an early warning system to detect landslides, the vital parameters that trigger the landslides should be identified and monitored. Soil moisture content is one of the vital parameter that provides information about the dynamic changes in the infiltration rate through different soil layers due to rainfall. Deploying moisture sensors in multiple layers at different depths increases the complexity and cost of deployment for large scale monitoring of landslides. In this paper we propose a system using electrical resistivity to continuously monitor moisture variations in multiple soil layers, at spatially distributed locations. Electrical resistivity technique is used as a non-destructive geotechnical method to derive the large-scale soil subsurface properties, especially gravimetric soil moisture content. An experimental set up has been implemented to derive the in-situ gravimetric soil moisture content. The relationship of electrical resistivity with soil moisture content and bulk density is derived based on extensive experimentations. Detailed statistical characterization of the results is performed. Comparison of the experimentation results with real moisture values are performed and the effectiveness of the proposed system has been shown in this paper.