Abstract
Located in the south-western part of Romania, the south-west development region overlaps the main relief forms: the Carpathians mountains, the Getic Subcarpathians, the Getic piedmont, the Romanian plain and the Danube valley. The study aims at providing an overview on the main pluvial parameters and their role in assessing rainfall erosivity in the study area. The authors assessed the occurrence, frequency and magnitude of some of the most significant pluvial parameters and their impact on the climatic aggressiveness in the study area. Thus, the monthly and annual mean and extreme climatic values for different rainfall related parameters (e.g., maximum amounts of precipitation/24 hr, heavy rainfall), as well as relevant indices and indicators for pluvial aggressiveness (Fournier, Fournier Modified, Angot) were calculated. The rainfall erosivity was assessed in order to provide both the spatial distribution of the triggering extreme weather phenomena and the resulted intensity classes for the analysed indices and indicators. The authors used long-term precipitation records (1961–2010) for the selected relevant meteorological stations distributed throughout all analysed relief units.
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Acknowledgements
The study was conducted in the framework of the research project: “Assessment of natural and technological hazards at national, regional and local levels” of the Institute of Geography, Romanian Academy, and the research theme of the Faculty of Geography, Spiru Haret University “Natural and technological hazards in urban ecosystems of the South West Development Region of Romania”. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their highly constructive comments and suggestions that helped improve this paper. All authors equally contributed to all stages of the article, i.e., data acquisition, processing, analysis and interpretation, and study conceptualization.
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Dumitraşcu, M., Dragotă, CS., Grigorescu, I. et al. Key pluvial parameters in assessing rainfall erosivity in the south-west development region, Romania. J Earth Syst Sci 126, 60 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-017-0834-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-017-0834-y