Specific Yield

04/18/26

“How can we quantify how much water we can extract from a saturated medium?”

Groundwater exists in the pores of saturated soils and rocks. We cannot extract all of the groundwater from the pores, some will stay stuck. We can quantify the groundwater extraction potential by taking a sample of the medium and dividing the volume of water that drains freely from gravity by the total volume of the soil or rock, resulting in the Specific Yield. The specific yield plus the volume of the remnant water, called the Specific Retention, equals the porosity of the .