Applicability of the Wind Erosion Prediction System for prediction of soil loss by wind in arable land

초록

The precise estimation of accelerated soil wind erosion that can cause severe economic and environmental impacts still has not been achieved to date. The objectives of this investigation were to verify the applicability of a Wind Erosion Prediction System (WEPS) that expressed the soil loss as mass per area for specific areas of interest on a daily basis for a single event in arable lands. To this end, we selected and evaluated the results published by Hagen in 2004 and the soil depth converted from the mass of soil losses obtained by using the WEPS. Hagen’s results obtained from the WEPS model followed the 1 : 1 line between predicted and measured value for soil losses with only less than 2 kg·m-2 whereas the values between the measured and predicted loss did not show any correlation for the given field conditions due to the initial field surface condition although the model provided reasonable estimates of soil loss. Calculated soil depths of the soil loss by wind for both the observed and predicted ones ranged from 0.004 to 3.113 cm·10 a-1 and from 0 to 2.013 cm·10 a-1, respectively. Comparison of the soil depths between the observed and predicted ones did not show any good relationship, and there was no soil loss in the predicted one while slight soil loss was measured in the observed one. Therefore, varying the essential model inputs and factors related to wind speed and soil properties are needed to accurately estimate soil loss for a given field in arable land.

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