Real-Time Sand Dune Simulation

Abstract

We present a novel real-time method for simulating aeolian sand transport and dune propagation. Our method is a GPU-based extension of the Desertscapes Simulation sand propagation model to additionally capture echo dunes and obstacle interaction. We validate our method by comparing it against an existing study of echo dune evolution in a wind tunnel environment. Additionally, we demonstrate the significantly improved performance of our method via comparison to the existing, CPU-based method. Lastly, we validate our method by comparing it to a published study exploring the evolution of dunes in a bidirectional wind environment driven by an offline, cellular autonoma based method. We conclude that the presented method is a simple and helpful tool for users in multiple domains who wish to capture physically plausible desertscape evolution in real time.