Rainfall Erosivity and Soil Erodibility at Makurdi, Nigeria

Alarming rates of soil erosion reports are received from various locations in Nigeria. High erosion hazard in soils of Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) maybe partly due to high climatic erosivity (Lal 1984; Oldeman, 1994). Several runoff plot experiments conducted in SSA have shown that erodibility as defined by the Universal Soil Loss Equation (Wischmeier and Smith, 1978) is generally low for predominant soils of the region (Lal, 1976; Roose, 1977; Wilkinson, 1975a; Obi and Asiegbu, 1980; Agada and Obi, 2016),therefore Rainfall erosivity and soil erodibility was assessed for Makurdi in north-central Nigeria. Findings show that the erosivity of rain for Makurdi was high with rainfall intensity as high as 240 mm/h. Rainfall amount per storm event was 71.7 mm. Soil erodibility was moderately high.