Datasets / R-Factor for the Coterminous United States


R-Factor for the Coterminous United States

Published By National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce

Issued about 9 years ago

US
beta

Summary

Type of release
a one-off release of a single dataset

Data Licence
Not Applicable

Content Licence
Creative Commons CCZero

Verification
automatically awarded

Description

The rainfall-runoff erosivity factor (R-Factor) quantifies the effects of raindrop impacts and reflects the amount and rate of runoff associated with the rain. The R-factor is one of the parameters used by the Revised Unified Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) to estimate annual rates of erosion. This product is a raster representation of R-Factor derived from isoerodent maps published in the Agriculture Handbook Number 703 (Renard et al.,1997). Lines connecting points of equal rainfall ersoivity are called isoerodents. The iserodents plotted on a map of the coterminous U.S. were digitized, then values between these lines were obtained by linear interpolation. The final R-Factor data are in raster GeoTiff format at 800 meter resolution in Albers Conic Equal Area, GRS80, NAD83.