Click on “Download PDF” for the PDF version or on the title for the HTML version.

If you are not an ASABE member or if your employer has not arranged for access to the full-text, Click here for options.

The late 1850s to 1900 experienced a large increase of settlers to the Great Plains states. They came with plows, and farmed the land. Drought was hard on the settlers and the soil, causing severe wind erosion. The Dirty Thirties (1935 to 1938) produced severe wind storms like the one on April 14, 1935, Palm Sunday, known as Black Sunday. The dusty sky over Washington DC helped Hugh Hammond Bennett pass the Flannagan-Hope Bill (The Research and Marketing Act of 1946) and start the Soil Erosion Service. Modern wind erosion prediction technology largely began with the publication in 1941 of Ralph Bagnold's classic book titled "The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes". Austin W. Zingg began erosion work in the laboratory at Kansas State University in 1947. Dr. William Chepil joined the wind erosion research effort in 1948. Neil P. Woodruff became the research leader in 1963 and completed the first widely used model for wind erosion. In 1965, a method of estimating and modeling erosion was introduced, called the Wind Erosion Equation (WEQ). The long hand version of worksheets was converted to a computer DOS version in 1988. In 1991, Soil Conservation Service teams then made a Computer Assisted Management System (Camps) version of WEQ. The model then evolved to a Field Office Computing System version in 1994. A standalone version of WEQ was developed in the late 1990s using Microsoft Excel. The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has seriously considered the Revised Wind Erosion Equation (RWEQ) and the Wind Erosion Prediction System (WEPS) as replacements for WEQ. The Agricultural Research Service, Wind Erosion Research Unit in Manhattan, KS has released a version of WEPS to NRCS in 2007 after many years of development. NRCS released WEPS to all NRCS field offices in November of 2010 as the tool to predict wind erosion on cropland across the US. It has taken from 1965 until now to find a replacement for WEQ. WEPS ushered in the first truly process-based model for use at the field level to estimate wind erosion.