Regionalization of hurricane rainfall in the forests, protected and reserved zones of Mexico

Abstract

AbstractExtreme events such as hurricanes repeatedly affect coastal areas in several tropical regions of the world. The economic and biodiversity losses caused by these extreme events are considerable. Mexico's coasts are exposed to hurricanes annually. A hydrological characterization and regionalization of the storms caused by the rain fields generated by all the hurricanes that touched the Mexican coast from 1966 to 2017 were carried out. Adimensional Huff curves are proposed to get precipitation hyetograms from which the erosion factor of a storm is obtained, using the universal soil loss equation (USLE). The results made it possible to get the typical precipitation hyetograms in the forests and protected areas before, during, and after the impact of a hurricane. The proposed hydrological regionalization made it possible to estimate the rainfall intensity in 30 min to characterize the start of rain erosion. The method proposed in this research was applied in the 177 natural protected areas (25,628,239 ha) as well as in the 370 voluntarily designated areas for conservation (399,643 ha) in Mexico. It is concluded that, with the regionalization and the proposed equations, it is possible to get typical hurricane precipitation hyetograms, which would allow us to detail the forest management plans in forests, ecological reserves, and protected areas of Mexico.