Power law of dust devil diameters on Mars and Earth

✍ Scribed by Ralph D. Lorenz

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 194 KB
• Volume: 203
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0019-1035
• DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2009.06.029

✦ Synopsis

Estimates from visual surveys of the frequency of dust devils, even at terrestrial localities known for their abundance, vary by some four orders of magnitude, making a quantitative hazard assessment difficult. Here I show (1) that new high-quality observations from Mars fit a power law size distribution, (2) that such a power law population can unify the discrepant terrestrial surveys, and (3) that the populations on the two planets appear similar.