Desert and Dune Consulting – desert dune hazard and sand drift mitigation

We provide advice and recommendations for mitigating the threat of wind-blown sand drift and migrating dunes onto infrastructure and assets, such as roads and solar PV power plants, in desert regions.

Services include analysis of wind climate to estimate potential sand transport fluxes onto site perimeters, detailed geomporphological surface analysis from satellite imagery, dune migration measurement and extrapolation, and recommendations on sand fence design parameters and perimeter surface management.

We have experience in providing advice on sand fence designs to protect solar PV plant installations in desert environments, such as Kuwait, Suadi Arabia, and UAE, for global construction companies including TSK and Larsen & Toubro.

Sand Drift Hazards

Solar PV panels buried by drifting sand (from Xiaot et al., 2022)

Seif dunes invading (moving to the right) into a solar PV plant in UAE (Google Earth)

Agricultural irrigation circles adjacent to active sand sea (Google Earth)

Service Examples

We calculate estimates of sand fluxes blowing from different directions, shown below as monthly sand fluxe roses (similar to how wind roses work), based on meteorological or model wind data:

We provide estimates of annual sand influx into the boundaries of a plant asset:

We measure the migration rates of dunes threatening a prospective site, from satellite imagery. In the example below, seif dunes are elongating towards the North-east:

We provide recommendations on the design and heights of sand fencing around a site to prevent invasion of wind-blown sand into plant assets: