Self-potential tomographic images as a tool to detect time-space-depending-changes of soil water content

Self Potential (SP) methods have been widely employed in several geophysical applications. Re-cently they have been acknowledged as a tool to detect the soil water content in the first few me-ters of the earth’s surface (vadose zone). The time-lapse analysis of SP tomographic imaging techniques might be considered an easy way for building-up a real time dynamic scenario of qualitative time-space-depending-changes of soil water content. This paper deals with a SP sur-veying method, coupled to a tomographic imaging technique, for a qualitative detection of soil water content and its variation in the vadose zone. The use of TDR has validated the qualitative results provided by a new acquisition apparatus developed at the University of Basilicata (Poten-za, Italy). A preliminary survey performed by using a tomographic imaging technique as SP data in-terpretation might result in a qualitative, low cost and fast estimation of soil water content mapping distribution in the vadose zone. A description of the technique and preliminary results are present-ed in the paper.