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Spatial Application of WEPS for Estimating Wind Erosion in the Pacific Northwest

Published by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, St. Joseph, Michigan www.asabe.org

Citation:  International Symposium on Erosion and Landscape Evolution (ISELE), 18-21 September 2011, Anchorage, Alaska  711P0311cd Paper #11023.(doi:10.13031/2013.39223)
Authors:   Jincheng Gao, Larry E Wagner, Fred Fox, Serena Chung, Brian Lamb
Keywords:   WEPS, Wind erosion, Model, GIS, Air quality

The Wind Erosion Prediction System (WEPS) is used to simulate soil erosion on cropland and was originally designed to run simulations on field scale sizes. This study extended WEPS to run on multiple fields (grids) covering a large region and conducted an initial investigation to assess how well WEPS performed in that environment by comparing simulations for two historical dust events in the Columbia Plateau region of the Pacific Northwest. We modified the WEPS source code to allow it to run not only on multiple grids, but also to save the state of the model so that it can be re-initiated from that state in future runs to allow the model to be stepped through time incrementally. We initially run WEPS on the whole state of Washington, with the entire Pacific Northwest region being our ultimate target area to eventually provide PM10 and PM2.5 emission as input to the chemical transport model CMAQ that is used by the AIRPACT regional air-quality modeling system for the Pacific Northwest.

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