Empirical erosion models like Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) models have been widely used to make spatially distributed soil erosion vulnerability maps. Even if the models detect vulnerable sites relatively well utilizing big data related to climate, geography, geology, land use, etc within study domains, they do not adequately describe the physical process of soil erosion on the ground surface caused by rainfall or overland flow. In other words, such models are still powerful tools to distinguish the erosion-prone areas at large scale, but physics-based models are necessary to better analyze soil erosion and deposition as well as the eroded particle transport. In this study a physics-based soil erosion modeling system was developed to produce both runoff and sediment yield time series at watershed scale and reflect them in the erosion and deposition maps. The developed modeling system consists of 3 sub-systems: rainfall pre-processor, geography pre-processor, and main modeling processor. For modeling system validation, we applied the system for various erosion cases, in particular, rainfall-runoff-sediment yield simulation and estimation of probable maximum sediment (PMS) correlated with probable maximum rainfall (PMP). The system provided acceptable performances of both applications.

Keywords: Physics-based model;Erosion and deposition;Runoff;Sediment yield;