Journal article
Rainfall erosivity in Europe.
- Panagos P European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Via E. Fermi 2749, I-21027 Ispra, VA, Italy. Electronic address: panos.panagos@jrc.ec.europa.eu.
- Ballabio C European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Via E. Fermi 2749, I-21027 Ispra, VA, Italy.
- Borrelli P European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Via E. Fermi 2749, I-21027 Ispra, VA, Italy.
- Meusburger K Environmental Geosciences, University of Basel, Switzerland.
- Klik A Institute of Hydraulics and Rural Water Management, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria.
- Rousseva S Institute of Soil Science, Agrotechnology and Plant Protection Sofia, Bulgaria.
- Tadić MP Meteorological and Hydrological Service, Zagreb, Croatia.
- Michaelides S Department of Meteorology, Nicosia, Cyprus.
- Hrabalíková M Faculty of Environmental Sciences, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Czech Republic.
- Olsen P Department of Agroecology, Aarhus University, Denmark.
- Aalto J Finnish Meteorological Institute, Finland.
- Lakatos M Hungarian Meteorological Service, Budapest, Hungary.
- Rymszewicz A UCD Dooge Centre for Water Resources Research, University College Dublin, Ireland.
- Dumitrescu A National Meteorological Administration, Bucharest, Romania.
- Beguería S Estación Experimental de Aula Dei-Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (EEAD-CSIC), Zaragoza, Spain.
- Alewell C Environmental Geosciences, University of Basel, Switzerland.
- 2015-01-27
Published in:
- The Science of the total environment. - 2015
English
Rainfall is one the main drivers of soil erosion. The erosive force of rainfall is expressed as rainfall erosivity. Rainfall erosivity considers the rainfall amount and intensity, and is most commonly expressed as the R-factor in the USLE model and its revised version, RUSLE. At national and continental levels, the scarce availability of data obliges soil erosion modellers to estimate this factor based on rainfall data with only low temporal resolution (daily, monthly, annual averages). The purpose of this study is to assess rainfall erosivity in Europe in the form of the RUSLE R-factor, based on the best available datasets. Data have been collected from 1541 precipitation stations in all European Union (EU) Member States and Switzerland, with temporal resolutions of 5 to 60 min. The R-factor values calculated from precipitation data of different temporal resolutions were normalised to R-factor values with temporal resolutions of 30 min using linear regression functions. Precipitation time series ranged from a minimum of 5 years to a maximum of 40 years. The average time series per precipitation station is around 17.1 years, the most datasets including the first decade of the 21st century. Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) has been used to interpolate the R-factor station values to a European rainfall erosivity map at 1 km resolution. The covariates used for the R-factor interpolation were climatic data (total precipitation, seasonal precipitation, precipitation of driest/wettest months, average temperature), elevation and latitude/longitude. The mean R-factor for the EU plus Switzerland is 722 MJ mm ha(-1) h(-1) yr(-1), with the highest values (>1000 MJ mm ha(-1) h(-1) yr(-1)) in the Mediterranean and alpine regions and the lowest (<500 MJ mm ha(-1) h(-1) yr(-1)) in the Nordic countries. The erosivity density (erosivity normalised to annual precipitation amounts) was also the highest in Mediterranean regions which implies high risk for erosive events and floods.
- Language
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- English
- Open access status
- hybrid
- Identifiers
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- DOI 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2015.01.008
- PMID 25622150
- Persistent URL
- https://sonar.ch/global/documents/110910
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