Dynamic assessment of rainfall erosivity in Europe: evaluation of EURADCLIM ground-radar data

Abstract. Heavy rainfall is the main driver of water-induced soil erosion, necessitating accurate spatial and temporal predictions of rainfall erosivity to predict the soil erosion response. This study evaluates the ground radar-based EUropean RADar CLIMatology (EURADCLIM) precipitation grids to quantify rainfall erosivity across European countries. Compared to Global Rainfall Erosivity Database (GloREDa) gauge-based interpolations, EURADCLIM overpredicts rainfall erosivity, principally due to residual artefacts in some regions which inflate the instantaneous rainfall rates. Overprediction is most pronounced in European regions with lower radar antenna coverage and complex topography, whereas flatter regions with lower erosivity and better radar coverage are better predicted spatially but with a tendency towards underprediction. Disagreement attributes to the input radar quality in EURADCLIM (derived from OPERA) and to a lesser extent the uncertainty in GloREDa due to its limited gauge records in some regions. Event (EI30) time series analysis showed reasonably good performance (Kling-Gupta Efficiency (KGE) > 0.4) in 50 % of the evaluated gauge locations, although significant overprediction by EURADCLIM was evident in the upper quantiles in some countries. To account for the propagation of these remaining single-hour rainfall artefacts, which have a large impact on the temporally-aggregated R-factor, applying a 80 mm h−1 threshold to limit the maximum I30 value (i.e., less than 0.1 % of GloREDa events exceed this threshold) during the calculation of rainfall erosivity significantly improves the performance of the EURADCLIM dataset at annual, monthly and event time scale. Following adjustment, EURADCLIM best agrees with GloREDa across Europe in July and August, while bigger differences were observed in June and winter in general. Annually, the spatially aggregated rainfall erosivity per country had a percent bias below 10 %. While applying simple I30 thresholds is promising, radar artefacts remain significant in areas with lower quality rainfall retrievals. In the absence of spatiotemporally continuous, high-quality ground-radar retrievals across Europe, we show the value of ensemble R-factor layers of EURADCLIM with three other rainfall erosivity grids (e.g., satellite retrievals) and discuss the possibility of ground radar to offer unique spatial detail in such ensembles.