Regional analysis of wind climatic erosivity factor: a case study in fars province, southwest Iran

Abstract

Wind erosion climatic erosivity is a measure of the climatic tendency to produce conditions conducive to wind erosion. This research develops a method to determine the regional climate’s tendency to cause wind erosion on the basis of a physically based climatic factor (CE) and linear moment analysis (L-moments) in Fars province, southwest Iran. CE is calculable from wind speed quantiles and other available meteorological data. The wind quantiles can be estimated by a frequency analysis of the available wind data. Wind speed data are often either not available or are of short record length, and thus, CE estimates from such data have large standard errors. In such a situation, data from several sites can be used to estimate wind speed quantiles at each site based on a regional frequency analysis. Monthly averages of maximum daily wind speed of 19 meteorological stations in Fars province were used for regional analysis. Based on L-moment analysis, two homogeneous regions were determined. Regional wind speed quantiles were calculated, and the results were used to calculate CE values for two 6-month wet and dry periods for each homogeneous region. Furthermore, CE values were estimated for each station in the study area using a Weibull distribution, and the results were compared with the regional-based CE values. It showed that CE values estimated using the regional-based approach have smaller sampling variance compared to those obtained from the Weibull method. The proposed method can be used to evaluate the regional risk of wind erosion in arid and semi-arid environments.