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A research programme financed by the EC Environment and Climate Programme, 1997-2000
Wind erosion in northwestern Europe Wind erosion creates many problems on European light soils: loss of crops, pollution and jeopardised sustainability. The problems have been known for millennia, and can be recognised, for example, in the 17th-century "Sand Boards" of the Veluwe in the Netherlands, the persistent efforts by the Danish Hedesaellskabet and the much more recent German Soil Protection Law. Mechanisation, increases in field size and contract farming are probably exacerbating the the rate of soil loss. Despite extensive research in control methods, there are few good data on either damage or the economic efficiency of the control measures, let alone criteria for applying laws and codes. Yet what data there are do suggest a major problem. For example, the direct cost only for the resowing after one single storm in May 1984 was estimated to be approximately 1.5 million ECU for sugar beet fields in Scania alone.
WEELS was a research programme desigend to model and measure the extent of the problem . It buildt a studies for a site round Cloppenburg, in Lower Saxony, where wind erosion is a "High Hazard", and where a GIS had been developed specifically for wind erosion research and combined with data from a portable wind tunnel and an instrumented field site. WEELS considerably expanded on this study, adding two more sites and five new methods:
- Estimates of wind erosivity based on climatic records, ground data and the European Wind Atlas Project;
- Analysis of the frequency of erosive winds and their relation to climatic variability using long station records, synoptic weather typing and large-scale pressure patterns, allowing forecasting for climate-change scenarios and evaluation of long-term variability (in conjunction with the ADVICE study in the EC E&C programme);
- Measurement of erosion over 30 yr using 137Cs, related in a geostatistical analysis with other soil and site characteristics;
- Advanced systems of trapping for the analysis of sediment quantity and character at oine site;
- Modelling of wind erosion on one site, for a period of 30 years (so that the modelling and measurements could be compared; a simpler risk-assessment model was developed for another site;
- An investigation of the costs of wind erosion and its policy framework.
The three test sites were near Barnham in Suffolk, round Groenhiem in Lower Saxony and the Vomb Valley in Skania
There were four research partners:
University
College London (UCL) - coordinator
The Geological Survey of Lower Saxony (Niedersächsisches Landesamt
für Bodenforschung) Institute of Soil Technology, Bremen (BTI)
Lund University (LU)
Wageningen Agricultural University (WAU)