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In over forty years of work, Dr. Lorenzo A. Richards is probably best known in the water resource community for deriving a governing equation for unsteady unsaturated subsurface flow in a porous medium, better known as the Richards Equation. The Richards Equation is a partial differential equation, which indicates the pressure head at a point in the flow field at any time. The Richards Equation is shown below:

Image:Equation.jpeg

Where Ψ is the tension head, K(Ψ) is the hydraulic conductivity as a function of the tension head, and C(Ψ) is the specific moisture capacity as a function of the tension head.

Dr. Lorenzo Adolph Richards was born April 24th, 1904 in Fielding, Utah. He attended Utah State University and received his Bachelors and Masters of Science degree in physics. In 1931 he completed a PhD at Conell University, his thesis was entitled “Capillary Conduction of Liquids through a Pourous Medium”. Dr. Richards went on to teach at Iowa State University for a short time before ending his career with the United States Department of Agriculture Salinity Laboratory in Riverside, CA.

Along with developing an equation for unsaturated groundwater flow, Dr. Richards work also involved improving methods to measure soil water potential . Hs research lead to the development of the tensiometer, which can be used to determine the tension head of the soil (Ψ). The tensiometer consists of a clear tube with a porous ceramic cup, which is filled with water. The ceramic cup is used to balance a pressure potential to establish an equilibrium, which indicates the matric potential of the soil.

While at the USDA Salinity Laboratory in Riverside CA, Dr. Richards work was in the field of soil-water-plant relations. During that time he developed a relationship between water content at certain water potential values and current soil water parameters.

Dr. Richards passed away in 1993, but his legacy to hydrology lives on. His body of work includes deriving a comprehensive mathematical approach to describing subsurface flow and developing techniques to measure soil water potential.

References

Freeze, R. Allen, and John A. Cherry. Groundwater. 1. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1979.

Lorenzo A. Richards." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. 22 Jan 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_A._Richards>.

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