Influence of antecedent soil moisture content and land use on the surface runoff response to heavy rainfall simulation experiments investigated in Alpine catchments

In small Alpine catchments, floods are mostly triggered by surface runoff generation during convective heavy precipitation events. Their magnitude also depends on the antecedent soil moisture content, which was shown in several previous studies. This study aims at understanding (a) which sites change their surface runoff response to rainfall events with high precipitation intensity under very moist pre-conditions to what extent and (b) on which site characteristics this depends on. Therefore, we conducted repeated rainfall simulation experiments (40–80 m(2), 1 h, 100 mm h(−1)) at 20 sites in five Eastern Alpine areas and analyzed their results on the basis of soil-physical parameters derived from collected soil samples. The hay meadow sites reacted with a strong increase in surface runoff to reduced saturation deficits, the pasture sites showed a smaller but visible response. The forest sites had the highest water retention capacities. The change in the surface runoff response is a function of the saturation deficit at the beginning of the initial experiment (r = −0.58). The soil physical parameters, especially the fine pore fraction (r = 0.56), correlate with the difference of the total surface runoff coefficient between the initial and the repeated experiment. The fine pore fraction also shows a high correlation (r = −0.78) with the saturation deficit at the beginning of the initial experiment, although pores of this fraction were saturated during all experiments. (Non-quantifiable) Land use effects, which in turn influence the soil physical parameters, play an important role in explaining how the surface runoff response in the repeated rainfall simulation experiment differs from the initial experiment. The information on land use and soil characteristics allowed the sites to be categorized into four types in terms of surface runoff disposition and the increase in total surface runoff coefficient in the second rainfall simulation experiment.