Rainfall data from 292 raingauges operated by the State of São Paulo were used to calculate the rainfall erosivity factor from the Universal Soil Loss Equation using a model available from the literature. The objective of this work was to use geostatistics to study the spatial variability of the rainfall erosivity and to construct isoline maps with high precision. Spatial autocorrelation was calculated with semivariograms for the rainy (October to March) and dry seasons (April to September), and for the yearly average. The range of the semivariograms were within 50 and 70 kilometers, however, the jack-knifing technique showed that only the 16 nearest neighbors should be used in order to stay within distances where stationarity existed. A total of 2,460 values were estimated on a 20 kilometers grid to allow for a good precision of contour maps. The contour maps showed that during the dry season the erosivity increases southward. During the rainy season, this trend inverts itself, with the erosivity increasing northward.
erosivity; mapping; kriging; soil conservation