Breeding and Solitary Wave Behavior of Dunes

Abstract

Beautiful dune patterns can be found in deserts and along coasts due to the instability of a plain sheet of sand under the action of the wind. Barchan dunes are highly mobile aeolian dunes found in areas of low sand availability and unidirectional wind fields. Up to now modelization mainly focussed on single dunes or dune patterns without regarding the mechanisms of dune interactions. We study the case when a small dune bumps into a bigger one. Recently Schwammle et al. and Katsuki et al. have shown that under certain circumstances dunes can behave like solitary waves. This means that they can ``cross'' each other which has been questioned by many researchers before. In other cases we observe coalescence, i.e. both dune merge into one, breeding, i.e. the creation of three baby dunes at the center and horns of a Barchan, or budding, i.e. the small dune, after ``crossing'' the big one, is unstable and splits into two new dunes.

6 pages and 4 figures, submitted to PRE

References in corpus (7)

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• Existence of travelling-wave solutions and local well-posedness of the Fowler equation
• Modelling formation and evolution of transverse dune fields
• Reproducing size distributions of swarms of barchan dunes on Mars and Earth using a mean-field model
• Bifurcation analysis of the transition of dune shape under unidirectional wind
• Barchan-barchan dune repulsion investigated at the grain scale
• Stability of transverse dunes against perturbations; a theoretical study using dune skeleton model
• Evolving dunes under flow reversals: from an initial heap toward an inverted dune
• Size distribution and structure of Barchan dune fields