Journal of Earth Science & Climatic Change
Open Access

Abstract

Global climate change can modify precipitation patterns, leading to more extremes with associated erosion events. The erosivity factor (R-factor) in the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) provides an effective means of evaluating the erosivity power of rainfall. R-factor indicates the potential water erosion risk and it plays an important role in water and soil conservation assessments. Accurate estimation R-factor requires continuous rainfall data; however, such data rarely demonstrate good spatial and temporal coverage. Characteristics of storms (duration, maximum intensity, depth and frequency) recorded in the study area were analyzed using a tipping-bucket series, which was used to estimate rainfall erosivity from ten minute data (2002-2013), recorded at thirty precipitation stations, and annual data (1896-2013) recorded at Taipei weather station of the Central Weather Bureau (CWB) in Taiwan, was used to analyze the temporal variation of rainfall erosivity. A simple power relation between annual R-factor and annual precipitation was derived. The long-term change trend analysis showed significant increasing or decreasing trend observed for the region. The results further indicated that there is a higher relationship between elevation and rainfall erosivity. This study may also be useful for sediment disasters on climate change.

Biography

Ming-Hsi Lee completed his PhD in 2006 from National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) and Postdoctoral studies from Disaster Prevention Research Center, NCKU. He is an Assistant Professor of NPUST. His major specialty contains debris flow disaster prevention, soil and water conservation and hydraulic engineering. He has published more than 20 papers in journals and has been serving as an Editorial Board Member of Journal of the Taiwan Disaster Prevention Society (JTDPS).