Abstract
The watershed of the Ningxia–Inner Mongolia reach of the Yellow River suffers serious wind erosion hazards and the areas with high wind erosion probabilities need to be identified to help in the building of the correct wind-sand blown hazard protection systems. In this study, the Integrated Wind-Erosion Modelling System model and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data set were used to identify the distributions of threshold wind speeds and wind erosion occurrence probabilities. Through field observations, the relationships among NDVI, vegetation cover, frontal area (lateral cover), roughness length, and threshold friction velocity were obtained. Then, using these relationships, the spatial distributions of threshold wind speeds for wind erosion at a height of 10 m for the different months were mapped. The results show that the threshold wind speed ranged from 7.91 to 35.7 m/s. Based on the threshold wind speed distributions, the wind erosion occurrence probabilities of different months were calculated according to the current wind speed. The results show that the distributions of wind erosion occurrence probabilities and threshold wind speeds were related to each other. The resulting maps of threshold wind speeds and wind erosion occurrence probabilities would help environmental and agricultural researchers in determining some strategies for mitigating or adapting from wind erosion hazards.
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Acknowledgments
This work was financially supported by the National Key Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2011CB403306), and the Foundation for Excellent Youth Scholars of CAREERI, CAS (Y451201001). Some of the data set has been provided by the Environmental and Ecological Science Data Center for West China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (http://westdc.westgis.ac.cn). All assistance we received has been greatly appreciated.
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Du, H., Xue, X., Deng, X. et al. Wind erosion occurrence probabilities maps in the watershed of the Ningxia–Inner Mongolia reach of the Yellow River, China. Environ Earth Sci 75, 86 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-015-4945-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-015-4945-y