Projected climate change impacts in rainfall erosivity over Brazil

Abstract

The impacts of climate change on soil erosion may bring serious economic, social and environmental problems. However, few studies have investigated these impacts on continental scales. Here we assessed the influence of climate change on rainfall erosivity across Brazil. We used observed rainfall data and downscaled climate model output based on Hadley Center Global Environment Model version 2 (HadGEM2-ES) and Model for Interdisciplinary Research On Climate version 5 (MIROC5), forced by Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5 and 8.5, to estimate and map rainfall erosivity and its projected changes across Brazil. We estimated mean values of 10,437 mm ha−1 h−1 year−1 for observed data (1980–2013) and 10,089 MJ mm ha−1 h−1 year−1 and 10,585 MJ mm ha−1 h−1 year−1 for HadGEM2-ES and MIROC5, respectively (1961–2005). Our analysis suggests that the most affected regions, with projected rainfall erosivity increases ranging up to 109% in the period 2007–2040, are northeastern and southern Brazil. Future decreases of as much as −71% in the 2071–2099 period were estimated for the southeastern, central and northwestern parts of the country. Our results provide an overview of rainfall erosivity in Brazil that may be useful for planning soil and water conservation, and for promoting water and food security.

Estimating Current and Future Rainfall Erosivity in Greece Using Regional Climate Models and Spatial Quantile Regression Forests

“…A number of papers in Europe examined the potential increase of rainfall erosivity using temporal trends of high resolution precipitation data Water 2020, 12, 687 3 of 20 in Western Germany [34], Belgium [35] and in the Czech Republic [36]. Other studies in various parts of the world used GCMs in conjunction with empirical equations that predict R using annual precipitation [37,38], monthly [39,40] and daily rainfall indices [41,42]. A different approach estimated projected R changes, using a weather generator with spatial and temporal downscaled precipitation values coming from various GCMs [43].Random Forests [44] is a data-driven algorithm in the area of supervised learning which tries to fit a model using a set of paired input variables and their associated output response and can be used in classification and regression problems.…”

Extreme rainfall, rainfall erosivity, and hillslope erosion in Australian Alpine region and their future changes

“…In recent decades, changes in climate extremes have attracted many attentions around the world because extreme climate events often result in more impacts on natural and human systems than their mean values. Rainfall extremes have been studied on regional, national, and global scales (Nearing et al ., ; Alexander et al ., ; Evans et al ., ; Almagro et al ., ). Extreme rainfall events across Australia are likely to become more intense and more often, and temperatures are also projected to continue increasing with more extremely hot days and fewer extremely cool days (CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, ).…”

“…Climate change influences the rainfall erosivity, erosive power, and cause hillslope erosion and land degradation, due to alteration of rainfall patterns (Almagro et al ., ). The climate circulation patterns affected from more water vapour in the atmosphere is modifying the intensity and frequency of extreme rainfall events.…”

“…The climate circulation patterns affected from more water vapour in the atmosphere is modifying the intensity and frequency of extreme rainfall events. Moreover, temperature and extreme rainfall events in Australia will increase more significantly than in many other regions around the world under warmer climates (Almagro et al ., ).…”

Alterações no ciclo hidrológico e na perda de solo devido aos diferentes usos do solo e variações climáticas em área de Cerrado

“…A precipitação poderá aumentar até 118 mm em 2090, considerando o pior cenário em termos emissão de gases estufa (Tabela 20). Esse aumento da precipitação na área de estudo concordou com os cenários projetados de erosividade das chuvas para a região do estudo simulados por Almagro et al (2017), que considerou também as premissas do IPCC-AR5 em seus métodos. Entretanto, as mudanças na precipitação, por serem menores que 10% da precipitação atual, não tiveram influência significativa no escoamento superficial e na erosão do solo, discordando de outros estudos semelhantes, localizados em regiões onde as projeções climáticas preveem cenários mais drásticos, em que estas alterações foram significativas (Nearing et al, 2004;Li et al, 2010;Mullan, 2013;Garbrecht e Zhang, 2015).…”