The Role of Rainstorm Properties on Crop-Land Soil Erosion: Coupling
Event-Scale Modeling with a Stochastic Rainfall Generator for Estimating
Erosion Risks
Abstract
Soil erosion is a worldwide agricultural and environmental problem that
threatens food security and ecosystem viability. In arable environments,
the primary cause of soil loss is short and intense storms that are
characterized with high spatiotemporal variability. The complex nature
of these erosive events imposes a great challenge for erosion modeling
and risk analysis. Accurate high-resolution measurement of rain
intensity is often lacking or sparsely available. As a result, many
studies rely on coarser-resolution rainfall data that often fail to
address the impact of intra-storm properties. In this study, based on a
novel statistical method, we quantify the discrete and cumulative
multiannual impact of rainstorm regime on runoff and soil erosion to
better understand the most important rainstorm properties on erosion
rate and amount, and, to provide storm-scale risk analyses. Central to
our analyses is the coupling of a processes-based crop-land erosion
model, Dynamic Water Erosion Prediction Project (DWEPP), with a
stochastic rainfall generator that produces localized rainfall
statistics at 5-min resolution (CoSMoS). To our knowledge, this is the
first study that calibrated DWEPP runoff and sediment at the plot-scale
on cropland. The model had an acceptable fit with measured event runoff
and sediment data collected in northern Israel (NSE = 0.79 - 0.82). We
then generated 300-year stochastic simulations of event-based runoff and
sediment yield and used them to estimate erosion risk and calibrate a
state-of-the-art frequency analysis method that explicitly accounts for
rainstorms occurrence and properties. Results indicate that in the study
area, high erosion rate events are characterized by intense rain bursts
of short duration (shorter than the usually adopted erosivity index of
30-min), and not necessary by events of large volume accumulation or
long duration. On these bases, we proposed an optimal rainfall erosivity
index that combines intra-storm properties for the study area. As
changes in rainstorm properties are expected under a changing climate,
we expect our methodology to be a valuable tool for investigating the
global concerns about future changes in soil erosion rate.