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| Titel |
Seasonal variation and climate change impact in Rainfall Erosivity across
Europe |
| VerfasserIn |
Panos Panagos, Pasquale Borrelli, Katrin Meusburger, Christine Alewell, Cristiano Ballabio |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2017
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
en
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 19 (2017) |
| Datensatznummer |
250144617
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 EGU/EGU2017-8466.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Rainfall erosivity quantifies the climatic effect on water erosion and is of high importance for
soil scientists, land use planners, agronomists, hydrologists and environmental scientists in
general. The rainfall erosivity combines the influence of rainfall duration, magnitude,
frequency and intensity. Rainfall erosivity is calculated from a series of single storm events
by multiplying the total storm kinetic energy with the measured maximum 30-minute rainfall
intensity. This estimation requests high temporal resolution (e.g. 30 minutes) rainfall data for
sufficiently long time periods (i.e. 20 years). The European Commission’s Joint Research
Centr(JRC) in collaboration with national/regional meteorological services and
Environmental Institutions made an extensive data collection of high resolution rainfall data
in the 28 Member States of the European Union plus Switzerland to estimate rainfall erosivity
in Europe. This resulted in the Rainfall Erosivity Database on the European
Scale (REDES) which included 1,675 stations. The interpolation of those point
erosivity values with a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) model has resulted in
the first Rainfall Erosivity map of Europe (Science of the Total Environment, 511:
801-815).
In 2016, REDES extended with a monthly component, which allowed developing
monthly and seasonal erosivity maps and assessing rainfall erosivity both spatially and
temporally for European Union and Switzerland. The monthly erosivity maps have been
used to develop composite indicators that map both intra-annual variability and
concentration of erosive events (Science of the Total Environment, 579: 1298-1315).
Consequently, spatio-temporal mapping of rainfall erosivity permits to identify the months
and the areas with highest risk of soil loss where conservation measures should
be applied in different seasons of the year. Finally, the identification of the most
erosive month allows recommending certain agricultural management practices (crop
residues, reduced tillage) in regions with high erosivity. Besides soil erosion mapping,
the intra-annual analysis of rainfall erosivity is an important step towards flood
prevention, hazard mitigation, ecosystem services, land use change and agricultural
production.
The application of REDES in combination with moderate climate change scenarios
scenario (HadGEM RCP 4.5) resulted in predictions of erosivity in 2050. The overall increase
of rainfall erosivity in Europe by 18% until 2050 are in line with projected increases of 17%
for the U.S.A. The predicted mean rise of erosivity is also expected to increase the threat of
soil erosion in Europe. The most noticeable increase of erosivity is projected for
North-Central Europe, the English Channel, The Netherlands and Northern France. On the
contrary, the Mediterranean basin show mixed trends.
The success story with the compilation of REDES and first rainfall erosivity map of
Europe was a driver to implement a Global Rainfall Erosivity Database (GloREDa). During
the last 3 years, JRC was leading an effort to collect high temporal resolution rainfall data
worldwide. In collaboration with 50 scientists worldwide and 100+ Meteorological and
environmental Organisations, we have developed a Global Erosivity Database. In this
database, we managed to include calculated erosivity values for 3,625 stations covering 63
countries worldwide. |
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