Regionalised soil roughness indexes

The soil roughness at the field level is an easy visually perceptible notion, but difficult to describe numerically. A measure chain was developed around a laptop-computer laser cell. The elevation data are measured on the ground with a square grid, they are regionalised variables, treated with geostatistics methods. For a given direction, the semi-variogram shape, depending on the distance, is always comparable with ground relief. This shape reflects in a positive way, the variations of this relief. New quantitative indexes are proposed. They are derived from semivariogram and they characterize the roughness vertically as well as horizontally