Related papers: Dune initiation in a bimodal wind regime
The engineering interest about dune fields is dictated by the their interaction with a number of human infrastructures in arid environments. Sand dunes dynamics is dictated by wind and its ability to induce sand erosion, transport and…
It is widely accepted that both ripples and dunes form in rivers by primary linear instability, the wavelength of the former scaling on the grain size, that of the latter being controled by the water depth. We revisit here this problem,…
Sand dunes are often covered by vegetation and biogenic crusts. Despite their significant role in dune stabilization, biogenic crusts have rarely been considered in studies of dune dynamics. Using a simple model, we study the existence and…
Windblown sand creates multiscale bedforms on Earth, Mars, and other planetary bodies. According to conventional wisdom, decameter-scale dunes and decimeter-scale ripples emerge via distinct mechanisms on Earth: a hydrodynamic instability…
Almost fifty years of investigations of barchan dunes morphology and dynamics is reviewed, with emphasis on the physical understanding of these objects. The characteristics measured on the field (shape, size, velocity) and the physical…
The linear stability analysis of the equations governing the evolution of a flat sand bed submitted to a turbulent shear flow predicts that the wavelength $\lambda$ at which the bed destabilises to form dunes should scale with the drag…
Subaqueous and aeolian bedforms are ubiquitous on Earth and other planetary environments. However, it is still unclear which hydrodynamical mechanisms lead to the observed variety of morphologies of self-organized natural patterns such as…
Granular media are frequently found in nature and in industry and their transport by a fluid flow is of great importance to human activities. One case of particular interest is the transport of sand in open-channel and river flows. In many…
We present a simple one-dimensional model to describe the evolution of a transverse dune field. The model is characterized by the distances between the dunes and their heights, which determine the inter-dune sand flux. The model reproduces…
Compared to barchan dunes, the morphodynamics of linear dunes that elongate on a non-erodible bed is barely investigated by means of laboratory experiments or numerical simulations. Using a cellular automaton model, we study the elongation…
Dunes are bedforms found on sandy terrains shaped by fluid flow on Earth, Mars, and other celestial bodies. Despite their prevalence, understanding dune dynamics at the grain scale is challenging due to the vast number of grains involved.…
Crescent shaped barchan dunes are highly mobile dunes that are usually presented as a prototypical model of sand dunes. Although they have been theoretically shown to be unstable when considered separately, it is well known that they form…
The dune morphodynamics study is under highly focused recently, due to aeolian process induced nonlinear correlation to sediment modification over bedform. Surface stress, inflicted by aloft upcoming wind, impacts, crucially, the sediment…
We apply a model for sand dunes to calculate formation of dunes on Mars under the present Martian atmospheric conditions. We find that different dune shapes as those imaged by Mars Global Surveyor could have been formed by the action of…
Planet formation models rely on knowledge of the physical conditions and evolutionary processes in protoplanetary disks, in particular the grain size distribution and dust growth timescales. In theoretical models, several barriers exist…
Wind-driven sand transport generates atmospheric dust, forms dunes, and sculpts landscapes. However, it remains unclear how the sand flux scales with wind speed, largely because models do not agree on how particle speed changes with wind…
We present a minimal model for the formation and migration of aeolian sand dunes. It combines a perturbative description of the turbulent wind velocity field above the dune with a continuum saltation model that allows for saturation…
Aeolian sand transport is a major process shaping landscapes on Earth and on diverse celestial bodies. Conditions favoring bimodal sand transport, with fine-grain saltation driving coarse-grain reptation, give rise to the evolution of…
Landforms such as sand dunes act as roughness elements to Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL) flows, triggering the development of new scales of turbulent motions. These turbulent motions, in turn, energize and kick-up sand particles,…
We demonstrate the feasibility of studying dunes in a laboratory experiment. It is shown that an initial sand pile, under a wind flow carrying sand, flattens and gets a shape recalling barchan dunes. An evolution law is proposed for the…