Windblown sand saltation: a probabilistic approach to sand transport rate

The accurate prediction of windblown sand drift events approaching human infrastructures and activities is fundamental in arid lands. In both technical and scientific literature sand drift estimation is carried out in mean terms. Typically, sand drift net direction and intensity are assessed by means of the resultant drift potential. However, windblown sand suffers a number of epistemic and aleatory uncertainties, related to both the wind and the sand fields. In this study windblown sand is considered as an environmental action in analogy to wind action. Several uncertainties involved in the phenomenon are considered: threshold shear velocity, 10-minute average wind velocity modulus and direction are assumed as random variables. The windblown sand drift estimation in probabilistic terms is useful in the infrastructure design perspective and allows to obtain characteristic values of windblown sand transport.