Clarification of the Regional Methodology for Calculating Potential Soil Flushing from Meltwater for the Northern Forest-Steppe of Central Siberia

Abstract—

The need to verify, modernize and refine existing models for calculating potential soil flushing from the effects of meltwater is due to the small number of studies of this type of erosion in the forest-steppe zone of Central Siberia and, as a consequence, the inability to reliably determine how accurate the calculation methods are in their current form under these conditions. For the agricultural zone of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, a regional model has been developed for calculating potential soil flushing based on a Universal equation and the Instructions’ formula. This paper presents the results of its verification, performed using the results of the author’s field measurements of soil flushing from meltwater by measuring removal cones on agricultural lands of the northern forest-steppe of Central Siberia (Krasnoyarsk forest-steppe). A refined version of the Regional Methodology is proposed, adapted to local hydrometeorological conditions and representing the formula of this model with an added correction factor \(K,\) taking into account the influence of the previous autumn moistening of soils and the intensity of water flow to the soil surface during snowmelt. Refinement and adaptation of the methodology allowed to increase the accuracy of the results of its application by an average of three times compared to the original type of the model, the average error decreased from 0.3 to 0.11. The refined version of the Regional methodology was tested in the course of the author’s research of snow-fall soil erosion in the Krasnoyarsk forest-steppe.