title: Rainfall erosivity in Europe.
abstract: Rainfall is one the main drivers of soil erosion. The erosive force of rainfall is expressed as rainfall erosivity. Rainfall erosivity considers the rainfall amount and intensity, and is most commonly expressed as the R-factor in the USLE model and its revised version, RUSLE. At national and continental levels, the scarce availability of data obliges soil erosion modellers to estimate this factor based on rainfall data with only low temporal resolution (daily, monthly, annual averages). The purpose of this study is to assess rainfall erosivity in Europe in the form of the RUSLE R-factor, based on the best available datasets. Data have been collected from 1541 precipitation stations in all European Union (EU) Member States and Switzerland, with temporal resolutions of 5 to 60 min. The R-factor values calculated from precipitation data of different temporal resolutions were normalised to R-factor values with temporal resolutions of 30 min using linear regression functions. Precipitation time series ranged from a minimum of 5 years to a maximum of 40 years. The average time series per precipitation station is around 17.1 years, the most datasets including the first decade of the 21st century. Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) has been used to interpolate the R-factor station values to a European rainfall erosivity map at 1 km resolution. The covariates used for the R-factor interpolation were climatic data (total precipitation, seasonal precipitation, precipitation of driest/wettest months, average temperature), elevation and latitude/longitude. The mean R-factor for the EU plus Switzerland is 722 MJ mm ha(-1) h(-1) yr(-1), with the highest values (>1000 MJ mm ha(-1) h(-1) yr(-1)) in the Mediterranean and alpine regions and the lowest (<500 MJ mm ha(-1) h(-1) yr(-1)) in the Nordic countries. The erosivity density (erosivity normalised to annual precipitation amounts) was also the highest in Mediterranean regions which implies high risk for erosive events and floods.
authors.affiliation: European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Via E. Fermi 2749, I-21027 Ispra, VA, Italy. Electronic address: panos.panagos@jrc.ec.europa.eu.
authors.forename: Panos
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Panagos
authors.affiliation: European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Via E. Fermi 2749, I-21027 Ispra, VA, Italy.
authors.forename: Cristiano
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Ballabio
authors.affiliation: European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Via E. Fermi 2749, I-21027 Ispra, VA, Italy.
authors.forename: Pasquale
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Borrelli
authors.affiliation: Environmental Geosciences, University of Basel, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Katrin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Meusburger
authors.affiliation: Institute of Hydraulics and Rural Water Management, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria.
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Klik
authors.affiliation: Institute of Soil Science, Agrotechnology and Plant Protection Sofia, Bulgaria.
authors.forename: Svetla
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Rousseva
authors.affiliation: Meteorological and Hydrological Service, Zagreb, Croatia.
authors.forename: Melita Perčec
authors.initials: MP
authors.lastname: Tadić
authors.affiliation: Department of Meteorology, Nicosia, Cyprus.
authors.forename: Silas
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Michaelides
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Environmental Sciences, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Czech Republic.
authors.forename: Michaela
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hrabalíková
authors.affiliation: Department of Agroecology, Aarhus University, Denmark.
authors.forename: Preben
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Olsen
authors.affiliation: Finnish Meteorological Institute, Finland.
authors.forename: Juha
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Aalto
authors.affiliation: Hungarian Meteorological Service, Budapest, Hungary.
authors.forename: Mónika
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lakatos
authors.affiliation: UCD Dooge Centre for Water Resources Research, University College Dublin, Ireland.
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Rymszewicz
authors.affiliation: National Meteorological Administration, Bucharest, Romania.
authors.forename: Alexandru
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Dumitrescu
authors.affiliation: Estación Experimental de Aula Dei-Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (EEAD-CSIC), Zaragoza, Spain.
authors.forename: Santiago
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Beguería
authors.affiliation: Environmental Geosciences, University of Basel, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Alewell
keywords: Erosivity density; Modelling; Precipitation; R-factor; RUSLE; Rainfall intensity; Rainstorm; Soil erosion