COMPARISON OF GERMAN AND SWISS RAINFALL SIMULATORS - INFLUENCE OF RAINFALL CHARACTERISTICS ON SOIL SURFACE-ROUGHNESS

Six different field rainfall simulators were compared. Soil surface roughness was tested by a simple field method before and after rainfall simulation. Preparation of the test site with a rotary cultivator inadvertently entailed spatial variability of roughness and aggregate size. Thus, the plots with finer seedbed showed higher runoff and soil loss. The relative decrease of roughness could best be correlated with the total kinetic energy as well as with the R factor of the different simulators ( r = 0.87 resp. 0.91). Thus, the degree of soil surface leveling was shown to be due to the rainfall characteristics of the different simulator types. However, there was no relation between change of soil surface roughness and runoff. The relative classification of the kinetic energy of the rainfall simulators explained the leveling of the soil surface better than the classifications previously used in many studies (r = 0.91 as against r = 0.73).