Abstract: Monitoring dune migration and morphologic change plays an important part of aeolian research. However, traditional measurement methods have great difficulties in the monitoring of a wide range of aeolian geometrodynamic processes because of the technical limiting and harsh environment, which had restricted the regional aeolian geomorphology research progress in a long run. The emergence of Co-registration of Optically Sensed Images and Correlation provides a good solution for the study of monitoring regional dune migration. In this paper, we discussed the advantages and some key issues of COSI-Corr technology during the dune migration monitoring. Its measurement precision and accuracy were assessed using the drone field ground-control measurement results. It revealed that: The higher measurement accuracy of the COSI-Corr occurred at the bottom edge of the leeward slope of the dune, reaching the 1/30 pix of the image pixel. There is a liner function between the measurement accuracy of COSI-Corr and the basal area of dune, the larger the basal area of dune, the higher the measuring error of COSI-Corr. The abnormal values at the ridge of sand dunes may be caused by the light reflecting which enhanced the noise during the data processing. Even though, COSI-Corr is still in its preliminary usage in aeolian geomorphology, it really improved the efficiency of the regional dune morphodynamic monitoring, and especially provides a possibility for the studying of dune migration and evolution process in those rural area where ground control measurement cannot carry out. Some specific issues also require us to constantly test and improve its measuring precision in future practice using.

Key words: Co-Registration of Optically Sensed Images and Correlation (COSI-Corr), regional aeolian geomorphology, morphodynamical monitoring, application prospect