Overview

Unsaturated flow is one of the central processes in MIKE SHE. The unsaturated zone is responsible for the partitioning of rainfall into runoff, evapotranspiration and groundwater recharge.

Unsaturated flow is primarily vertical since gravity plays the major role during infiltration. Therefore, unsaturated flow in MIKE SHE is calculated only vertically, which is sufficient for most applications. However, this may limit the model’s validity in some situations, such as on steep hill slopes with contrasting soil properties in the soil profile, or in small scale models with significant slopes (e.g. earth dams).