Physical behavior of throughfall in a planting of Eucalyptus

Abstract

The understanding of rainfall physical characteristics and their interaction with the landscape allow the development of more feasible mathematical models to be applied on the planning of agricultural conservation practices. However, only a few studies have tried to characterize the throughfall in planted forests, like eucalyptus plantation. The objective of this study was to characterize the throughfall behavior under Eucalyptus canopy, at Lavras county region, southern Minas Gerais state, relating it to the hydrology pattern and erosive potential of the rainfall. For that, rainfall events were individualized by means of two criteria: 6 and 3 hours between the events, consecutively. For each one of the approaches, both gross precipitation and throughfall were classified in terms of the rainfall hydrology pattern linked to the following rainfall features: rainfall depth, rainfall duration, kinetic energy, average and maximum intensities and erosivity. On average, throughfall events have corresponded to 79.2% of the gross precipitation. In addition, it has showed to be 36.4% less erosive than gross precipitation. The advanced rainfall pattern was identified as predominant considering both methodologies for rainfall events individualization.

Keywords:
Rain kinetic energy; Interaction canopy of eucalyptus-precipitation; Pattern precipitation