Measurements of the aeolian sand transport saturation length

By Bruno Andreotti, P. Claudin, Olivier Pouliquen. 2008

147 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The wavelength at which a dune pattern emerges from a flat sand bed is controlled by the sediment transport saturation length, which is the length needed for the sand flux to adapt to a change in wind strength. The influence of the wind shear velocity on this saturation length and on the subsequent dune initial wavelength has remained controversial. In this paper, we present direct measurements of the saturation length performed in a wind tunnel experiment. Complementary to this, initial dune wavelengths are measured under different wind conditions — in particular after storms. Using the linear stability analysis of dune formation, it is then possible to deduce the saturation length from field data. Both direct and indirect measurements agree that the saturation length is almost independent of the wind strength. This result supports the idea that grain inertia is the dominant dynamical mechanism limiting sediment transport saturation on dunes.

Subfields: Earth-Surface Processes, Mechanical Engineering, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e253ce6af8d24d37316902667a25df827b2078bc

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In Earth-Surface Processes

In Mechanical Engineering

In Soil Science

Citations in the corpus

The physics of wind-blown sand and dust (2012, background): “…ejected particles are themselves accelerated by wind and eject more particles when impacting the surface, causing an exponential increase in the horizontal saltation flux in the initial stages of saltation (Anderson and Haff 1991, McEwan and Willetts 1993, Andreotti et al 2010, Durán et al 2011a).”
On aeolian transport: Grain-scale interactions, dynamical mechanisms and scaling laws (2011, methodology): “In wind tunnel controlled experiments (Andreotti et al., 2010) the longitudinal profiles of the flux q(x) have been obtained with and without an input flux at the upstream bed entrance (Fig.”