Wind Erosion in Western Queensland Australia

Chapter 6 – Field Assessments and Model Validationmodel output pixels. The Landsat scenes covered five regions of the study area (Figure 6.1)and were captured on 10, 12, 17, 19 and 26 October 2006. Australian Bureau of Meteorologyrainfall records for western Queensland indicate that no rain fell in the validation areas forfive weeks prior to data acquisition, so in the absence of high resolution soil moisture datasurface soil moisture content was considered static for the simulations.6.3.3 Model Validation ApproachAUSLEM was run to predict land erodibility on a continuous scale (0: not erodible to 1:highly erodible) for each of the five input data scenes (example shown in Figure 6.3).Figure 6.3 Example model output image for the Bedourie scene showing visual assessments of landerodibility as an overlay to the model assessments. White areas are non-erodible with tree covergreater than 20%.163