Reliably predicting the geomorphology and climate of planetary bodies requires knowledge of the dynamic threshold wind shear velocity below which saltation transport ceases. Here we measure this threshold in a wind tunnel for four well‐sorted and two poorly sorted sand beds by visual means and by a method that exploits a regime shift in the behavior of the surface roughness caused by momentum transfer from the wind to the saltating particles. For our poorly sorted sands, we find that these measurement methods yield different threshold values because, at the smaller visual threshold, relatively coarse particles do not participate in saltation. We further find that both methods yield threshold values that are much larger (60–250%) for our poorly sorted sands than for our well‐sorted sands with similar median particle diameter. In particular, even a rescaling of the dynamic saltation threshold based on the 90th percentile particle diameter rather than the median diameter cannot fully capture this difference, suggesting that relatively very coarse particles have a considerable control on the dynamic threshold. Similar findings were previously reported for water‐driven sediment transport. Our findings have important implications for quantitative predictions of saltation transport‐related geophysical processes, such as dust aerosol emission.

A sand surface subjected to a continuous wind field exhibits a regular ripple surface. These aeolian sand ripples emerge and develop under the coupling effect between the wind field, bed surface topology, and sand particle transportation. Lots of theoretical and numerical models have been established to study the aeolian sand ripples since the last century, but none of them has the capability to directly reproduce the 3D long-term development of them. In this work, a novel numerical model with wind-blow sand and dynamic bedform is established. The emergence and long-term development of sand ripples can be obtained directly. The statistical results extracted from this model tally with those deduced from wind tunnel experiments and field observations. A simplified bed surface particle size description procedure is used in this model, which shows that the particle size distribution makes a very important contribution to sand ripples’ final steady state. This 3D bedform provides a more holistic view on the merging of small bumps before regular ripples’ formation. Analyzing the wind field results reveals an ignored development on the particle dynamic threshold during the bedform deformation.

Theoretically, the sand flux will not change after the wind-driven sand particle transport reaches the saturated state. However, it has been found in many wind-tunnel experiments that the sand flux will gradually decrease with time in long-term particle transport duration and will eventually reach a new stable state. In this work, we used numerical simulations to study the source of this kind of decrease and found it is caused by the sand ripple on the bed surface. The ripple index showed a strong correlation to the sand flux, and it decreased during the initial stage of the ripple formation. With a simplified theoretical model, we found the linear relationship between the Shields number and the particle transport load holds. However, the slope of this relationship and the dynamic threshold of particle entrainment decreased with the ripple index. As the sand flux scales linearly with the particle transport load, we finally derived an expression that describes how the sand flux on the ripple bedform varies with the wind strength. From this expression, we found the sand flux increases with ripple index, and it was easier to be influenced by the ripple bed form in small wind strength.