Development of daily rainfall erosivity model for Kelantan state, Peninsular Malaysia

Abstract

Abstract The study was conducted to develop a rainfall erosivity model for tropical climates to estimate daily rainfall erosivity and determine the most effective power law relationship between rainfall erosivity and daily precipitation. Thirty minute resolution rainfall data recorded in 55 stations of a state in Peninsular Malaysia were analysed. Using three precipitation limits of 0.1, 5.0 and 12.7 mm, the behaviour of rainfall on average annual rainfall erosivity gave ranges of 10,264–54,284, 8,151.5–48,301 and 4,958–39,938 MJ mm ha−1 h−1 y−1 respectively. It was found that the number of individual events, occurring within a day, were more in the area compared other types of events for all precipitation limits (0.1, 0.5 and 12.0 mm). Spatio-temporal variation of monthly coefficient values of power law relationship was found with the highest R2 in the range of 0.93–0.94 for 0.1 mm precipitation limit. Out of 55 stations, 15 were selected for model development and assessment. On the basis of importance of smaller events, a 0.1 mm precipitation limit was selected for the proposed model. The proposed model was found good for monthly and annual rainfall erosivity estimation apart from few limitations. Furthermore, the validity of the proposed model was checked for different parts of the area.