Soil Erosion in a British Watershed under Climate Change as Predicted Using Convection-Permitting Regional Climate Projections

Abstract

Climate change can lead to significant environmental and societal impacts; for example, through increases in the amount and intensity of rainfall with the associated possibility of flooding. Twenty-first-century climate change simulations for Great Britain reveal an increase in heavy precipitation that may lead to widespread soil loss by rising the likelihood of surface runoff. Here, hourly high-resolution rainfall projections from a 1.5 km (‘convection-permitting’) regional climate model are used to simulate the soil erosion response for two periods of the century (1996–2009 and a 13-year future period at ~2100) in the “Rother” catchment, West Sussex, England. Modeling soil erosion with EROSION 3D, we found a general increase in sediment production (off-site erosion) for the end of the century of about 43.2%, with a catchment-average increase from 0.176 to 0.252 t ha−1 y−1 and large differences between areas with diverse land use. These results highlight the effectiveness of using high-resolution rainfall projections to better account for spatial variability in the assessment of long-term soil erosion than other current methods.