75-Years of Wind Erosion Control: The History of Wind Erosion in the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

75 years of Wind Erosion Control: The History of Wind Erosion in the Natural Resources Conservation Service

In the 75 years history of the USDA agency, the Natural Recourses Conservation Service (NRCS) is rooted in wind erosion.  The Dirty Thirties produced severe wind storms like the one on April 14, 1935, Palm Sunday, known as Black Sunday.  The dusty sky over Washington DC helped Hugh Hammond Bennett start the Soil Erosion Service.  Modern wind erosion prediction technology largely began with the publication in 1941 of Ralph Bagnold's classic book titled "The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes".  In 1965 a method of estimating and modeling erosion was introduced, called the Wind Erosion Equation (WEQ).  The long hand version of worksheets was converted to a computer DOS version in 1988.  In 1991 teams then made a Computer Assisted Management and System (Camps) version of WEQ.  The model then evolved to a Field Office Computing System version in 1994.  A standalone version of WEQ was developed in the late 1990s using Microsoft Excel.  NRCS has selected the Wind Erosion Prediction System (WEPS) as the replacement for WEQ.  The Agricultural Research Service, Wind Erosion Research Unit in Manhattan, KS has released a version of WEPS to NRCS in 2007.  NRCS will now use WEPS as the tool to predict wind erosion on cropland across the US.  It has taken from 1965 to now to find a replacement for WEQ.  WEPS will usher in the first truly processed based model for use at the field level to estimate wind erosion.