Buildings affect aeolian sediment transport and bedform development in sandy environments. Cellular automaton (CA) models have, however, only been used to simulate natural bedform dynamics. This study extends a well-known aeolian CA model to include sediment dynamics around buildings, and uses this model to explore the interaction of building-induced deposition and erosion with natural bedform dynamics. New CA rules are introduced to represent acceleration, deceleration and sideward transport of sediment around obstacles. The simulated deposition and erosion patterns show good agreement with field experiments. The model reproduces the shape and location of the morphological pattern around a single building, and effects of building spacing on this pattern for building groups. Model results further demonstrate that building-induced effects interact with local bedform dynamics and can alter the shape, growth and migration of sand dunes.

In sandy environments, like the beach-dune system, buildings not only affect the airflow, but also the aeolian sediment transport in their surroundings. In this study, we determine how the horizontal size of sediment deposition patterns around buildings depends on the building's dimensions. Four one-day experiments were conducted at the beach using box-shaped scale models. We tested 32 building geometries, where scale model height, width and length ranged between 0.3 and 2.0 m. The deposition patterns were substantial in size: the total length and width of the deposition area were up to an order of magnitude larger than the horizontal building dimensions. It was found that the size of upwind and downwind deposition patterns depended more on the building width perpendicular to the wind direction (w), than on the building height (h). Building length had little influence. Especially the combined effect of w and h correlated well with horizontal deposition size. This is expressed in a new scaling length B for deposition around buildings, with B=w^2/3·h^1/3. As a first validation, the spatial dimensions of the initial deposition patterns observed around a scale model of 2.5 × 12 × 2.5 m, placed at the beach for five weeks, showed good agreement with those predicted based on B.

In this study we tested to what extent grain count data from a laser particle counter, when enriched with granulometric data, can lead to accurate measurements of aeolian sediment fluxes in the field. Field experiments were conducted at Koksijde beach (Belgium) with a vertical array of five Wenglor fork sensors and co-located vertically stacked mesh sand traps. Sand collected in the traps was used to both obtain the reference values for sediment flux as well as to obtain granulometric data at the five Wenglor sensor elevations. Grain counts were transformed to sediment fluxes by combining the granulometric data with the grain size dependent, effective detection width concept. It was found that the limitation of the Wenglor sensor to have a minimum detectable grain size, well within the diameter range of sand grains in transport, could easily be corrected for through a linear relation of Wenglor detectable sediment flux with total sediment flux. However, we found that the Wenglor derived fluxes deviated from the sand trap derived fluxes in an inconsistent manner, both in the vertical and over time, which made us conclude that there is no uniform calibration possible to match the Wenglor data with the trap data. This suggests that further studies using optical aeolian transport sensors should focus on analysing the raw photoelectric signal rather than on internally processed count data.