This report summarizes the many advances that have been made in the study of planetary Aeolian processes that have taken place since the first Planetary Dunes Workshop was held in May of 2008, through 2011. Many of the recent studies are facilitated by the wealth and variety of high resolution imaging and spectra data still being returned by multiple spacecraft in orbit and on the surface of Ma...

The morphological characteristics of yardangs are the direct evidence that reveals wind and fluvial erosion for lacustrine sediments in arid areas. These features can be critical indicators reconstructing local directions environment conditions. Thus, fast accurate extraction is key to studying their regional distribution evolution process. However, existing automated methods characterize limit...

Representation of surface roughness effects on aeolian sediment transport is a key source of uncertainty in wind erosion models. Drag partitioning schemes are used to account for roughness by scaling the soil entrainment threshold by the ratio of shear stress on roughness elements to that on the vegetated land surface. This approach does not explicitly account for the effects of roughness confi...

aeolian process and subsequently soil erosion are key factors in dryland environments. such phenomena are related not only to geoecological factors (lithology, topography, and climatology) but also to land-use and plant cover changes. formation of new sand dunes in damghan explains the development of human activities over the past. the aim of this study is to explain the land use changes and th...

Aeolian desertification is a kind of land degradation that is characterized by aeolian activity, resulting from the responses of land ecosystems to climate change and anthropogenic disturbances. The source areas of the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers are typical regions of China’s Tibetan Plateau affected by aeolian desertification. We assessed the vulnerability of these areas to aeolian desertificat...

Transport of the earth surface material associated with diffusion brings a landform change, and the resulted sediment or debris thickness is approximated by a normal distribution. The essential feature of this geomorphic process is described in terms of the transport distance and the spatial spreading of the masses. A unit mass on a slope may move at a rate b downward and spread at a diffusivit...

A model that predicts sediment transport due to wind action can be valuable addition to hydrodynamic models to describe the long-term interaction between land and water. This thesis presents the application of an aeolian transport model [Sauermann et al., 2001, Kroy et al., 2002] as a tool for the evolution of coastal nourishments and dunes. The model was originally developed to describe import...