Commonalities in WEPP and WEPS and efforts towards a single erosion process model

Since the late 1980's, the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been developing process-based erosion models to predict water erosion and wind erosion. During much of that time, the development efforts of the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) and the Wind Erosion Prediction System (WEPS) were independent of each other. However, many of the same physical processes important in erosion by wind and erosion by water are modeled by WEPS and WEPP in similar ways. This paper discusses the WEPP and WEPS models, their differences and commonalities, and current and future work towards creation of a single process-based erosion model that would allow prediction of erosion by wind and/o