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Sand patches are one of the early stages of aeolian bedforms. They form onnon-erodible surfaces in both desert and coastal environments. Their initiation is associated with thechange of saltation transport law on rigid and granular beds 1. Here wepresent a two-dimensional model that couples these surface-dependenttransport laws with the feedback of the bed elevation on the wind flow.Analysing the spatio-temporal evolution of an initial very flat sandpatch, we emphasise the central role of the input flux as well as thelengthscale over which occurs the transition between the two transportlaws. We also show that, for adjusted parameters of the model, we are ableto reproduce the growth and the propagation of these small metre-scalebedforms over time, in quantitative comparison with field measurements.1 P. Delorme, J.M. Nield, G.F.S. Wiggs, M.C. Baddock, N.R. Bristow, J.Best, K.T. Christensen and P. Claudin, Field evidence for the initiationof isolated aeolian sand patches, Geophys. Res. Lett. 50 , e2022GL101553(2023).
Rambert et al. (Sat,) studied this question.