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Impact of multi-day rainfall events on surface roughness and physical crusting of very fine soils

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posted on 2017-11-16, 16:47 authored by Joanna BullardJoanna Bullard, Annie Ockelford, Craig L. Strong, Helene A. Aubault
Soil surface roughness (SSR), a description of the micro-relief of soils, affects the surface storage capacity of soils, influences the threshold flow for wind and water erosion and determines interactions and feedback processes between the terrestrial and atmospheric systems at a range of scales. Rainfall is an important determinant of SSR as it can cause the dislocation, reorientation and packing of soil particles and may result in the formation of physical soil crusts which can, in turn, affect the roughness and hydrological properties of soils. This paper describes an experiment to investigate the impact of a multi-day rainfall event on the SSR and physical crusting of very fine soils with low organic matter content, typical of a semi-arid environment. Changes in SSR are quantified using geostatistically-derived indicators calculated from semivariogram analysis of high resolution laser scans of the soil surface captured at a horizontal resolution of 78 μm (0.078 mm) and a vertical resolution of 12 μm (0.012 mm). Application of 2 mm, 5 mm and 2 mm of rainfall each separated by a 24 h drying period resulted in soils developing a structural two-layered ‘sieving’ crust characterised by a sandy micro-layer at the surface overlying a thin seal of finer particles. Analysis of the geostatistics and soil characteristics (e.g. texture, surface resistance, infiltration rate) suggests that at this scale of enquiry, and for low rainfall amounts, both the vertical and horizontal components of SSR are determined by raindrop impact rather than aggregate breakdown. This is likely due to the very fine nature of the soils and the low rainfall amounts applied.

Funding

JEB, CLS and HA were funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NE/K011461/1); AO was funded by Loughborough University.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Published in

Geoderma

Volume

313

Pages

181 - 192

Citation

BULLARD, J.E. ... et al, 2017. Impact of multi-day rainfall events on surface roughness and physical crusting of very fine soils. Geoderma, 313, pp. 181-192.

Publisher

Elsevier © The Authors

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-10-26

Publication date

2017-11-06

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Elsevier under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

ISSN

0016-7061

Language

  • en

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