Vegetation and Induration as Sand Dunes Stabilizators

Abstract

Sand dunes are found in a wide variety of shapes in deserts and coasts, and also on the planet Mars. The basic mechanisms of dune formation could be incorporated into a continuum saltation model, which successfully reproduced the shape of the barchan dunes and has been also applied to calculate interaction of barchans in a field. We have recently extended our dune model to investigate other dune shapes observed in nature. Here, we present the first numerical simulation of the transformation of barchan dunes, under influence of vegetation, into parabolic dunes, which appear frequently on coasts. Further, we apply our model to reproduce the shape of barchan dunes observed on Mars, and we find that an interesting property related to the martian saltation is relevant to predict the scale of dunes on Mars. Our model could also reproduce unusual dune shapes of the Martian north polar region, like rounded barchans and elongated linear dunes. Our results support the hypothesis that these dunes are indurated.

Vegetation in Drylands: Effects on Wind Flow and Aeolian Sediment Transport

“…The erosion patterns simulated by Dupont et al's [52] model were qualitatively consistent with previous wind tunnel [59,78] and field [46,140] observations. Minimal dune models (e.g., [168,169]), which combine analytical descriptions of turbulent wind velocity with continuum saltation models, have also been used to successfully simulate transitions between barchan and parabolic dunes [169,170].…”

Long-time evolution of models of aeolian sand dune fields: Influence of dune formation and collision

“…More recently, the models have been used to study the influences of wind and sand flux on details of dune morphology Parteli et al, 2006a) and the influence of vegetation and induration in stabilizing dunes (Herrmann et al, 2008). Additionally, many studies have examined the characteristic scaling of dune formation and evolution in different environments, such as underwater or on Mars (Claudin and Andreotti, 2006;Parteli and Herrmann, 2007).…”

CFD simulation of the wind field over a terrain with sand fences: Critical spacing for the wind shear velocity

“…One outlook of the present work would be the simulation of the soil topography in presence of the fences. Such simulations can be achieved by coupling the CFD modeling presented here with the morphodynamic model for aoelian landscapes developed in the last years (Sauermann et al, 2001;Kroy et al, 2002;Sauermann et al, 2003;Parteli et al, 2006;Herrmann et al, 2008;Durán et al, 2010;Parteli et al, 2011;Luna et al, 2009Luna et al, , 2011Luna et al, , 2012Melo et al, 2012;Parteli et al, 2014Parteli et al, , 2019Muchowski et al, 2019).…”