Dust events occur more frequently during the Austral spring and summer in dust regions, including central Australia, the southwest of Western Australia, and the northern and southern regions of eastern Australia using remote sensing and reanalysis datasets. High-concentration dust is distributed around central Australia and in the downwind northern and southern Australia. Typically, around 50 % of the dust lifted settles on Australian land, with the remaining half being deposited in the ocean.

An exceptionally heavy rainfall event occurred on 20 July 2021 in central China (the 7.20 storm). The storm presents a rare opportunity to examine the extreme rainfall erosivity. The storm, with an average recurrence interval of at least 10 000 years, was the largest in terms of its rainfall erosivity on record over the past 70 years in China. The study suggests that extreme erosive events can occur anywhere in eastern China and are not necessarily concentrated in low latitudes.

This paper provides new rainfall erosivity maps over mainland China based on hourly data from 2381 stations (available at https://doi.org/10.12275/bnu.clicia.rainfallerosivity.CN.001). The improvement from the previous work was also assessed. The improvement in the R-factor map occurred mainly in the western region, because of an increase in the number of stations and an increased temporal resolution from daily to hourly data.

A gridded input dataset at a 10 km resolution of a weather generator, CLIGEN, was established for mainland China. Based on this, CLIGEN can generate a series of daily temperature, solar radiation, precipitation data, and rainfall intensity information. In each grid, the input file contains 13 groups of parameters. All parameters were first calculated based on long-term observations and then interpolated by universal kriging. The accuracy of the gridded input dataset has been fully assessed.

This study quantified the bias of rainfall erosivity estimated from gridded precipitation data, and the results showed the grid-estimated mean annual rainfall erosivity were underestimated by 15–40 % in the eastern China. The scale difference between gridded data and gauge data was the main cause. In application, the empirical models established based on gauge data should not be used directly for gridded data, or a bias correction process needed to be considered for the model outputs.