Excerpt
Wind erosion is a global problem, especially in arid and semiarid regions of the world, which leads to land degradation and atmosphere pollution. The process-based Wind Erosion Prediction System (WEPS), developed by the USDA, is capable of simulating the windblown soil loss with changing weather and field conditions and different manmade management scenarios (Hagen 1991; Hagen 2004; Tatarko et al. forthcoming). Erosion in WEPS is driven by stochastically generated hourly wind data by the WINDGEN program, which is more appropriate than using measured data directly, and thus hourly wind data for the entire day are needed to build the statistical database (Donk et al. 2005). The current version of WEPS contains wind data for 2,718 stations within the United States. When running WEPS, wind data from the nearest station, from a station assigned to a polygon region or interpolated from nearby stations, can be used (Wagner forthcoming). Another database, named CLIGEN, which contains other climate information, including daily temperature, precipitation, solar radiation, etc., is also needed for the WEPS simulation.
There is a great potential to extend WEPS to other countries and regions, such as China, which has a similar area, latitude location, and climate diversity to the United States.
- © 2013 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society