Simulation of Rainfall Erosivity Dynamics in Romania under Climate Change Scenarios

Soil erosion is triggered by rainfall through the detachment of soil particles and their transport downslope, playing a key role in soil erosion models. Together with the vegetation cover, rainfall is a temporal dynamic factor, inducing corresponding time variations of erosion rates. Under current climate change, rainfall is also changing its characteristics and our study aimed to reveal whether these changes will significantly affect rainfall erosivity in Romania, and implicitly the soil erosion. To achieve this purpose, we developed a statistical non-parametric model for predicting rainfall erosivity on the basis on the modified Fournier index and applied it to future precipitation evolution scenarios. The precipitation data were extracted from the CHESLA database for the Romanian territory for two climate change contrasting scenarios (RCP 4.5 and 8.5). Average predictions from five selected climate models were used in order to minimize prediction uncertainty. The results show that rainfall erosivity is likely to increase, at least during the 2041–2060 period, especially in the south-western, western and eastern part of the country, which may cause a corresponding increase in soil erosion rates, with an average of 1–2 t ha−1 yr−1. During the 2061–2080 period, rainfall erosivity is likely to decrease in central and eastern Romania.