Exploring effects of rainfall intensity and duration on soil erosion at the catchment scale using openLISEM: Prado catchment, SE Spain

Abstract

Abstract:In semi-arid areas, high-intensity rainfall events are often held responsible for the main part of soil erosion. Long-term landscape evolution models usually use average annual rainfall as input, making the evaluation of single events impossible. Event-based soil erosion models are better suited for this purpose but cannot be used to simulate longer timescales and are usually applied to plots or small catchments. In this study, the openLISEM event-based erosion model was applied to the medium-sized (¾50 km 2 ) Prado catchment in SE Spain. Our aim was to (i) test the model's performance for medium-sized catchments, (ii) test the ability to simulate four selected typical Mediterranean rainfall events of different magnitude and (iii) explore the relative contribution of these different storms to soil erosion using scenarios of future climate variability.Results show that because of large differences in the hydrologic response between storms of different magnitudes, each event needed to be calibrated separately. The relation between rainfall event characteristics and the calibration factors might help in determining optimal calibration values if event characteristics are known. Calibration of the model features some drawbacks for large catchments due to spatial variability in K sat values. Scenario calculations show that although ¾50% of soil erosion occurs as a result of high frequency, low-intensity rainfall events, large-magnitude, low-frequency events potentially contribute significantly to total soil erosion. The results illustrate the need to incorporate temporal variability in rainfall magnitude-frequency distributions in landscape evolution models.

Simulating the spatio-temporal dynamics of soil erosion, deposition, and yield using a coupled sediment dynamics and 3D distributed hydrologic model

“…6a) spanned only around 73% of the simulation time, it delivered 98.4% (99.9%, modeled) of the total sediment yield. This is in line with previously reported results from both field (Fu, 1989) and modeling experiments (Baartman et al, 2012;Zhang et al, 2012) that have shown that a few extreme events may contribute to a large portion of annual total soil erosion. Notably, our research area has a temperate weather and lacks extreme precipitation events, but nonetheless the dry period (~27% of the total simulation time) delivered only~1% of the total SSY.…”

Assessing hillslope-channel connectivity in an agricultural catchment using rare-earth oxide tracers and random forests models

“…6). It is likely that the combination of large amounts of antecedent precipitation and high precipitation intensities lead to a large amount of sediment detachment and enough overland flow to transport these sediments, as also shown in other studies in Spain (Baartman et al, 2012;Cantón et al, 2001;Giménez et al, 2012;Gómez-Plaza et al, 2001). Giménez et al (2012) furthermore, argued that most of the sediments at the outlet of the Latxaga catchment seemed to have come from areas close to the drainage network, which agrees with our findings.…”

Gully morphology, hillslope erosion, and precipitation characteristics in the Appalachian Valley and Ridge province, southeastern USA

“…A thorough understanding of gully erosion with respect to local climatic conditions is essential for effective planning, land management and conservation (Poesen et al, 2003). The impacts of climatic and meteorological factors on gully erosion has been widely studied (Nearing et al, 2005;Poesen et al, 2003) through modeling (Baartman et al, 2012;Favis-Mortlock and Boardman, 1995;Li et al, 2011;van Oost et al, 2000;Williams et al, 1996), laboratory experiments (Berger et al, 2010;el Kateb et al, 2013;Römkens et al, 2002), and field studies (Angel et al, 2005;Baartman et al, 2012;Capra et al, 2009;Hancock and Evans, 2010;Smith and Dragovich, 2008;Wei et al, 2010).…”

“…A few studies have investigated the relationship between precipitation intensity and soil erosion at the plot scale under natural precipitation conditions over several years (Baartman et al, 2012;Keay-Bright and Boardman, 2009;Porto et al, 2014;Wei et al, 2010). Capra et al (2009) investigated the relationship between gully erosion and the precipitation erosivity factor in a cultivated catchment in Italy at a yearly scale.…”