Process of soil erosion by wind

Abstract in the past, wind erosion has often been modeled as a series of lumped factors, and each factor embodied a number of individual erosion processes. During the last decade considerable progress has been made in formulating process equations that represent the individual sources and sinks for eroding soil. The objective of this report is to provide an overview of some wind erosion processes on agricultural lands. By considering two soil states (crusted and aggregated) along with the erosion processes, one can define the temporal soil properties of dry soils that control soil erodibility. These temporal properties include the dry stabilities, mass fractions and size distributions of mobile and immobile soil components, as well as surface roughness. The threshold friction velocities of bare soils also depend upon surface roughness and cover of immobile clods and crusts. The transport capacity of the suspension-size soil is several times larger than the limited transport capacity for the saltation and creep-size component of horizontal soil discharge. Thus, on large fields suspension discharge often exceeds saltatiodcreep discharge. Sources of saltatiodcreep discharge include entrainment of loose aggregates and abrasion of immobile clods and crust. Sinks for saltation/creep discharge include trapping by surface roughness, interception by standing biomass and breakage to suspension-size