ABSTRACT
Changes in water content and suction under climatic actions is one important process in several geotechnical issues, such as earth-structures deformation, foundation heave/settlement or slope failures seated in the vadose zone. In addition, under certain conditions, these changes may act as a forcing condition for the underlying saturated water column and control cyclic pore pressure changes at higher depths. The deterministic modelling of these effects requires considering soil-atmosphere thermo-hydro-mechanical interactions under long time high-frequency series. Associated computational cost appears quickly to be a limitation to this type of simulations, particularly when going to large geometry or regional analyses.This article shows two strategies to estimate the soil hydraulic response in time under climatic series handled by Fourier decomposition. These strategies present similarities with techniques used to analyse soil response under seismic actions and propose to define soil transfer functions relating the input (climatic time series) to the output (water content or suction/pore pressure variation at several depths).
