Simulating event-scale rainfall erosivity across European climatic regions

Soil erosion is time compressed into a number of episodic erosive rainfall events with an associated potential to detach and transport soil particles (rainfall erosivity), each possessing unique spatial and temporal characteristics. Rainfall erosivity events in Europe follow extreme value distributions in which a limited number of rainstorms dominate the long-term budget of available erosive energy. To combat soil erosion in Europe in a targeted manor, timely erosion mitigation measures should derive from dynamic model simulations that incorporate spatially and temporally distributed estimations of rainfall erosivity. Rain gauge measurements from singular points are typically used to quantify rainfall erosivity, however the spatial uniqueness of rainfall presents a key limitation to dynamically model rainfall across broad spatial scales with a limited number of point measurements. Discretised gridded precipitation datasets with a widespread (e.g. continental) spatial coverage potentially offer an opportunity to adequately replicate the dynamics of rainfall erosivity events, however their performance remains poorly tested in the pan-European context

MATTHEWS Francis;  PANAGOS Panagiotis;  VERSTRAETEN Gert; 

2022-03-24

ELSEVIER

JRC127377

0341-8162 (online),   

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0341816222001436,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC127377,   

10.1016/j.catena.2022.106157 (online),