CLIGEN as a weather generator for RUSLE2

Abstract

RUSLE2 is a rainfall erosion model that, in its standard mode, predicts long term soil losses as an aid to making decisions related to soil conservation in the USA. In recent times, RUSLE2 has developed a capacity to predict event soil losses using user entered data for event rain and EI30. WEPP is a more process based model which uses a stochastic weather generator, CLIGEN, to generate events that are stochastically distributed in time. CLIGEN does not estimate event EI30 values for the rainfall events it generates but it is possible to do so through use of erosivity densities (EI30 per unit quantity of rainfall) data available in RUSLE2. This enables CLIGEN to be used as a climate generator for RUSLE2 and provides the capacity to use RUSLE2 in roles similar to the ones where WEPP is being applied.