Twentieth century dune migration at the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, Colorado, relation to drought variability

The Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in southern Colorado contains a large dune mass banked against the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The dune mass is bounded for hundreds of kilometers by a vegetated low-relief sand sheet with abundant active parabolic and barchanoid dunes. The clear morphology of these dunes, formed by winds mostly from the southwest, and the unambiguous identification of these forms in remotely sensed images provide straightforward targets to assess temporal changes in dune position. A digital database of georeferenced remote sensing images from 1936 to 1999 is used to quantify parabolic and barchan dune migration rates and surface reflectance, an indicator of vegetation cover, with evolving drought conditions in the twentieth century. The total net migration of 13 parabolic dunes in 63 years is 0.31 to 0.66 km, whereas 11 barchan dunes moved an average of 0.12 to 0.47 km. Compared to intervening wet year, there is at least a three-fold increase in average parabolic dune migration, during well-documented droughts in the 1930s, 1950s, and 1990s with a concomitant reduction in vegetation cover and surface water resources. The landscape response to the most recent drought in the late twentieth century is documented by an average parabolic dune migration rate of 30 m/year, which is a six-fold acceleration over prior wet years, and similar to dune response during the 1930s. A nonlinear threshold for parabolic dune migration is indicated with lower quartile Palmer Drought Severity Index values of < − 2, which corresponds to at least a 25% reduction in summer and autumn precipitation.