Demonstration and Analysis of Rarefied Particle Motions on Hillslopes

During the last century, descriptions of sediment transport on the surface of Earth have been mostly deterministic and strongly influenced by concepts from continuum mechanics. The assumption that particle motions on hillslopes and in rivers satisfy the continuum hypothesis has provided an important foundation for this topic. Recent studies, however, have recognized that bed load and hillslope sediment transport conditions often are rarefied and do not satisfy continuum assumptions, therein pointing to the need for new ways of describing particle motions and transport. The problem of rarefied sediment transport is probabilistic in nature, and emerging methods for describing particle motions hark back to the pioneering work of Einstein (1938), who conceptualized bed load transport as a probabilistic problem. Here we provide a data set of particle travel distances and supplemental high-speed videos of particle-surface collisions collected during laboratory experiments to assess a theoretical formulation of ...