Using a New Dataset of International Climate Parameters to Drive Soil Erosion Modeling

Input parameters for 12,703 locations around the world were determined to parameterize a stochastic weather generator called CLIGEN, commonly used to drive soil erosion models, including RHEM, WEPP and RUSLE. Monthly statistics relating to daily precipitation, temperature and solar radiation, etc., were determined as parameters. The parameters related to precipitation were calculated primarily from the NOAA GHCN-Daily network. The remaining input parameters were calculated from various sources including global meteorological and land-surface models that are informed by remote sensing and other methods. The new CLIGEN dataset includes inputs for locations in the U.S., which were compared to a selection of stations from an existing U.S. CLIGEN dataset representing 2,648 locations. This validation showed reasonable agreement between the two datasets, with the majority of parameters showing less than 20% discrepancy. The new CLIGEN dataset has the potential to improve the spatial coverage of analysis for a variety of CLIGEN applications, and reduce the effort needed in preparing climate inputs. Examples of how the CLIGEN inputs may be used in soil erosion modeling are also demonstrated using the RHEM model. The dataset is available at the National Agriculture Library Data Commons website at https://data.nal.usda.gov/dataset/international-climate-benchmarks-and-input-parameters-stochastic-weather-generator-cligen (DOI: https://doi.org/10.15482/USDA.ADC/1518706).