Chinese Mainland Annual Rainfall Erosivity Fusion Gridded Dataset (1983–2020)

The Chinese Mainland Annual Rainfall Erosivity Fusion Gridded Dataset is a long-term, high-resolution rainfall erosivity (RE) dataset covering 38 years (1983–2020). It aims to provide fundamental data support for studies on soil erosion, hydrological modeling, and ecological and environmental management. The dataset spans the period from 1983 to 2020, with a spatial resolution of 0.25° × 0.25°.During dataset construction, observational data from more than 545 meteorological stations across China were used as reference data. The Extra Trees Regression (ETR) machine learning model was employed to fuse annual rainfall erosivity estimates derived from five commonly used gridded daily precipitation datasets. The estimation of rainfall erosivity followed the method proposed by Xie et al. (2016):Xie, Y., Yin, S.-q., Liu, B.-y., Nearing, M.A., Zhao, Y. (2016). Models for estimating daily rainfall erosivity in China. Journal of Hydrology, 535, 547–558. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2016.02.020The five precipitation datasets used for fusion include:Satellite-based precipitation products: CHIRPS;Gauge-interpolated precipitation products: CN05.1, CHM, CPC;Reanalysis precipitation product: ERA5.The annual rainfall erosivity data were generated by fusing CHIRPS, CPC, CN05.1, CHM, and ERA5 datasets using the ETR model. Each file is named “RE_yyyy”, where yyyy denotes the corresponding year (1983–2020).The dataset provides rainfall erosivity values for three rainfall intensity categories:Moderate RE: calculated from daily rainfall between 10 and 24.9 mm;Large RE: calculated from daily rainfall between 25 and 49.9 mm;Heavy RE: calculated from daily rainfall greater than or equal to 50 mm.This dataset integrates the strengths of multiple precipitation products—combining the spatial continuity of satellite data, the local accuracy of ground-based observations, and the physical consistency of reanalysis data. It provides high-precision rainfall erosivity information for studies of soil erosion across regions with diverse climatic and topographic conditions in China.