## 4 Discussion
Comparable splash erosion rates from our analysis with \(EI_{30}\) were found up to 200 MJ ha mm\({}^{-1}\) h\({}^{-1}\); however, with increasing \(EI_{30}\), our splash erosion rates increased up to 2500 g m\({}^{-2}\), whereas the rates from Spain remained constant with an average rate of 337 g m\({}^{-2}\). The fact that the samples were exchanged between measurements may contribute to higher rates obtained for soils in our study, which was in seedbed conditions. There is still no general agreement on which rainfall parameters define splash erosion [12]. Parameters dependent on raindrop size and fall velocity, such as rainfall \(KE\), momentum, intensity, or a combination of these, are commonly used to describe the raindrop impact on splash detachment. According to our analysis, \(KE_{sum}\) could not (Figure 4) explain the variabilities between splash erosion rates obtained for the same amount of \(KE\). The reason for that lies in different rainfall intensities between the rainfall events, where high-intensity rainfall produced more splash erosion than low-intensity rainfall (Figure 5). In the field study by [PERSON] [36], it was also concluded that the use of \(KE\) as an estimate of the rainfall detachment power leads to an underestimation of the relative impact of events with high intensities. From the strong linear relationship between splash erosion and rainfall intensity obtained in our study (Figure 7, Table 5), it can be stated that the splash erosion was more related to rainfall intensity than to other analyzed parameters (\(KE_{sum}\), \(KE_{h}\) and \(EI_{30}\)). Nevertheless, we found good agreement between the splash erosion and \(KE_{sum}\) divided by rainfall duration (\(T\)) (Figure 6, Table 4). This indicates that \(KE\) can also be used as the parameter to predict splash erosion, even when events with different rainfall intensities are analyzed, but its erosive impact has to be expressed through rainfall duration. The detailed information about drop size distribution allowed us to discern the differences in rainfall characteristics between the study sites. The differences in the splash rates between the rainfall events for the same range of \(KE\) also contributed to the differing drop size distribution. This was also noticed for the splash rates measured at the Mistelbach site, which is characterized as the site with the highest average raindrop diameter. Another example of this is the extreme event (E\({}_{2}\)) reported in the results (Figure 6), where the high splash erosion rates were affected by the large drop size measured for this event. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [59] found that rainfall with larger drops produce more detachment than rainfall with smaller drops, for rainfall having the same total \(KE\). Recently, [PERSON] et al. [60] also reported the gradual increase of splash erosion rates with increasing raindrop diameter. Detailed information about raindrop size distribution plays an important role for splash erosion studies like ours, where the direct measurements of the parameters is needed to describe the factors affecting the splash erosion process. The soil's physical characteristics (texture, soil moisture, organic matter, structure, infiltration capacity, etc.) play an important role in understanding the soil detachment by raindrop splash [2]. Splash erosion of the three soils was positively correlated to the sand content, and significantly (\(p<0.05\)) negatively correlated to clay content. For this reason, cumulative splash erosion rates were highest for the BK soil with highest sand content, and significantly different (\(p<0.05\)) from \(ZW\) soil with the highest clay content (Table 1). Equivalent results were reported in a recent study by [PERSON] et al. [61],using simulated rainfall on same soils. The high splash detachability of soils with dominating sand content was also confirmed in experiments by [PERSON] et al. [3], [PERSON] et al. [19], and [PERSON] et al. [62].