Realistic Dune Field Surface Stress Prediction (Technical Report)

TL;DR

This paper develops and verifies mathematical models for predicting surface stress over dune fields, highlighting the effectiveness of the mixing layer velocity profile in capturing aeolian process impacts on sediment erosion.

Contribution

It introduces a mixing layer-based surface stress prediction model for realistic dune fields, validated against field data, advancing understanding of aeolian sediment transport mechanisms.

Findings

Mixing layer model outperforms other models in stress prediction.

Surface stress correlates with mixing layer length scale.

Residual erosion patterns explained by flow channeling and sediment scour.

Abstract

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 erosion pattern. The aloft atmospheric dune surface layer (ASL) is composed of inertial layer and roughness sublayer. The logarithmic velocity profile is valid within inertial layer based on previous findings, where attached-eddy occupied the higher elevations scaled with local wall-normal height. While, mixing layer velocity profile is displayed in this work to predict the surface shear over White Sands National Monument (WSNM), the length scale of which is revealed as proportional to mixing layer length scale. Given the realistic dune field morphology and aeolian process, a series of mathematic stress models have been proposed and verified. Among these models, mixing layer model shows the best performance, which elucidates and confirms the mixing layer analogy over realistic dune field. Finally, a schematic structural model shows that "sediment scour" and "flow channeling" indeed is the reason for the large residual values distributed in narrow interdune surfaces, which has a great consistency with previous finding.