Impacts of Climate Change on Desert Dunes

Desert dunes and sand seas cover approximately 20% of the world’s arid zones, and their morphology and patterning are an important diagnostic of environmental surface conditions not only on Earth but also on other planetary bodies.

Encroachment of moving dunes can pose significant threats to transportation infrastructure, agriculture, industry, and settlements. Migrating sand dunes can be agents of desertification and they play an important role in dust emissions into the atmosphere at globally significant dust sources. Understanding potential future changes in desert dune morphology, mobility, and migration direction due to changes in wind climate therefore has a range of important socio-economic ramifications. Changing wind climate also plays a key role in the potential expansion of dune fields and sand seas, as well as reactivation of currently dormant fields.

In this study we analyse wind data from CMIP6 climate simulations in the context of Drift Potential (DP) to determine projected changes, by the end of this century, in sand-moving wind regime parameters in the world’s arid zones under the high-emission scenario. We interpret the projected changes in different desert regions around the globe to infer potential increases as well as decreases in dune field activity, shifts in migration direction of mobile sand dunes, changes in dune shapes and pattern, and impacts on currently dormant dune fields.