Recent progress in observational and computational techniques has advanced studies of of fluid dynamics and interfacial geometry in porous media. Computational advances largely concern Lattice Boltzmann (LB) method that has been shown to be useful in simulating microscale flow in porous media. With some phenomenological or thermodynamic extensions, the LB method is also able to deal with microscale interfacial phenomena in single or multiphase systems. In this presentation we present a comparison between observed and simulated water retention characteristics. Observed data were obtained for glass-bead systems using the Advanced Photon Source Synchrotron in DOE's Argonne laboratory at a resolution of 17 microns. Simulated water retention characteristics were generated with a Lattice Boltzmann model that is able to calculate flow and interfacial phenomena at the pore scale. We show that we obtain an excellent match between observations and simulations for both drainage and wetting data.