Spatiotemporal distribution and variation of wind erosion over the Tibetan Plateau based on a coupled land-surface wind-erosion model

Abstract Wind erosion has notable impacts on ecology, water supply and regional climate, but its distributions and long-term changes are still poorly quantified for the Tibetan Plateau (TP). This study develops a coupled land-surface wind-erosion model (HRLDAS-WEPS) in two dimensions horizontally to analyze wind-erosion distributions and its temporal variations under the climate change in 1979–2015 over the entire TP. Two model enhancements are also used, including the application of MODIS vegetation datasets and the optimization of snow-cover parameterizations. Evaluation results indicate that the enhanced coupled model can generally represent the wind-erosion distributions over the TP, being mainly located in the arid and semi-arid areas and occurring in winter and spring, as compared with station observations and satellite datasets. In 1979–2015, wind erosion has a significant (P