Search results for "rainfall erosivity"

Assessment of soil particle erodibility and sediment trapping using check dams in small semi-arid catchments

2017

Check dams can be used as a source of information for studies on sediment characteristics and soil particle erodibility. In this study, sediment yield and grain size distribution (GSD) were measured in twenty small catchments draining into a rock check dam in NW Iran for different runoffs during 2010–2011. Significant correlations were found between sediment yield and slope steepness, vegetation cover and soil erodibility factor (K) of the catchments. The erodibility of soil particles was determined using the comparison of GSD between sediment and original soil. Clay was the most erodible soil particle which showed 2.05 times more percentage in sediment than the original soil. The erodibili…

Estimating rainfall erosivity by aggregated drop size distributions

2016

Rainfall erosivity is defined as the potential of the rain to cause erosion, and it can be represented by rainfall kinetic power. At first in this paper, the raindrop size distributions (DSD) measured by an optical disdrometer located at Palermo in the period June 2006–March 2014 and aggregated for intensity classes, are presented. Then an analysis of raindrop size characteristics is carried out, and the reliability of Ulbrich's distribution, using both the maximum likelihood and momentum estimate parameter methods, is tested. The raindrop size measurements are used to determine the experimental rainfall kinetic power values, which are compared with the ones calculated by a theoretically de…

Practical thresholds to distinguish erosive and rill rainfall events

2019

Abstract In this paper, 1017 rainfall events from 2008 to 2017 are used to identify the rainfall threshold that produces upland erosion at the Masse (central Italy) and Sparacia (southern Italy) experimental stations. The rainfall events are classified into three classes: non-erosive, interrill-only and rill. The threshold values for separating as correctly as possible the erosive rains (case I) and the rill rains (case II) are derived solely from the hyetograph. Each threshold value is obtained by imposing that the long-term erosivity of the events above the threshold is equal to the long-term erosivity of all erosive events (case I) or only rill events (case II). The performances of selec…

ESTIMATING RAINFALL EROSIVITY BY DROP SIZE DISTRIBUTIONS

Water soil erosion is a process of detachment and transport of soil particles due to rainfall and runoff and it is the main cause of the modeling of extended portions of the earth's surface. The acceleration of the process through anthropogenic perturbation has severe impacts on soil and environmental quality. Soil erosion above a certain level will reduce soil productivity over the long haul. It exposes subsoil, which has often poor qualities for crop establishment and growth, and it can lead to stand loss by sediment deposition. A fundamental property of rainfall for understanding how it is made up is the raindrop size distribution (DSD). The knowledge of the raindrop size distribution at…

Theoretical advancements on a recently proposed method to measure rainfall energy

2022

Soil erosion induced by rainfall is mainly due to the rainfall impact besides the consequent surface runoff. Rainfall kinetic energy is the most used variable to represent its erosivity. The latter represents the weathering attitude to erode soil and is a fundamental variable of the erosion process. Consequently, precise measurements of rainfall erosivity have to perform to develop a reliable prediction model of the erosive phenomenon. Currently, impact energy can be reliably measured only by disdrometers. These instruments measure the Drop Size Distribution (DSD) which, joined with the raindrop falling velocity, allow to calculate, by integration, the impact kinetic energy. However, disdro…