Modeling Wind Erosion Events – Bridging the Gap Between Digital Soil Mapping and Digital Soil Risk Assessment

Wind erosion submits fine as well as coarse soil particles into the atmosphere, thereby affecting physical and chemical processes, affecting radiative forcing, chemical reactions and biological systems. This study was conducted to quantify wind erosion events by generating data for soil erodibility and wind erosivity for the Danube Basin. Estimates of surface soil texture were generated from ∼8,000 soil profiles and 54 auxiliary datasets using the regression-kriging method. The quality of the regression equation was not satisfactory. Validation showed an RMSE of 8.6, 10.4 and 13.5 for clay, sand, and silt. Different texture scenarios were generated and the number of wind erosion events for the year 2006 was modeled using weather data from the European Centre for Medium range weather forecast. Vegetation cover fraction was approximated from Meteosat data. Magnitude and spatial extent of wind erosion estimations showed similar order compared to wind erosion estimations based on the European Soil Database.