Within-storm soil surface dynamics and erosive effects of rainstorms

Abstract

This study deals with the characteristics which make a rainstorm an event that can produce intense erosion and even trigger the formation of a badlands site. In order to keep the presentation closely linked to a real situation, a rainstorm which took place on an experimental farm equipped for soil erosion studies was selected. The effects of the erosive rainstorm, which fell on dry antecedent moisture conditions, are given in terms of total rill erosion and rill cross-section along the slope. Unfortunately, the data collected did not answer the basic question, i.e., what combination of factors makes a rainstorm critical? A set of rainfall simulation experiments was therefore carried out, in the field and in the laboratory, in order to evaluate the soil surface variations caused by the rainstorm. All the experiments were performed on dry antecedent soil moisture conditions. It was confirmed that the characteristics of the infiltration curve are modified considerably during such rain events. The saturated conductivity of the first thin top-layer is also modified and it can easily decrease by a factor of 10 due to drop impact forces. The runoff coefficient is also influenced by the raindrop impacting energy and it increases sharply with cumulate energy until a maximum value is reached. The surface micro-relief dynamics was also studied. It was very clearly shown that impacting drop kinetic energy is the rainfall characteristic which is linked to random roughness decay. Cumulative rainfall was not able to align all the data in a single trend. The effect of surface micro-relief decay on the rainstorm erosive power was examined using two equations, thus linking Manning's hydraulic roughness to random roughness. Using a simulated runoff over the field plots that were particularly eroded by the rainstorm, it was possible to observe that the runoff drag forces reached values of between 3 and 100 times the ones which would have been calculated if the random roughness had been constant during the same event. Many of the soil surface characteristics that are modified interact with one another and with erosion. Examining each of them in isolation cannot explain the drastic increase in erosivity of a rainstorm, as the latter is the result of the combined effects of all the surface modifications.