Sand flux in a desert site of Mongolia
- 1National University of Mongolia, Mongolia (munkhtsetseg.e@seas.num.edu.mn)
- 2Nagoya University, Japan (shinoda.masato@g.mbox.nagoya-u.ac.jp)
- 3Desert Research Institute, Nevada, USA (jack.gillies@dri.edu)
- 4Cologne University, Germany (yshao@uni-koeln.de)
Mongolia experiences frequent dust and sand storms, particularly in the spring. As a result, this country losses a huge amount of top soils, which triggers land degradation and desertification. We measured sand flux of 2 consecutive dust storm cases occured in 2011 using BSNE (Big Spring Number Eight) sand traps installed at the Bulgan meteorological station in the Gobi area .
Vertical gradients for the sand mass (flux) demonstrated 3 typical patterns:
- a) sand flux increases with height when there is a transported sand from the areas distanced away from the study site
- b) sand flux is constant vertically in the days following dust sand storm (DSS)
- c) sand flux declines exponentially with the height when DSS occur at the site.
Among these three typical patterns, we investigated the c) pattern to quantify the amount of eroded soil during the on-site dust emissions of dust storm event (DSS) at the site. The DSS was largely associated with the increased friction velocity excluding some cases those are related to a short time-span of rainfall even though underlain by dry soil surface etc. Furthermore, we estimated a saltation height, Zq, which was much greater (30 cm) than the other reported findings (3-10 cm).
Keywords: sand flux patterns, saltation height, sand traps, Mongolia
How to cite: Munkhtsetseg, E., Shinoda, M., Gillies, J., and Shao, Y.: Sand flux in a desert site of Mongolia, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-3886, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-3886, 2023.
