Mineral dust receives increasing attention in Earth system sciences due to its diverse impacts on the environment and human daily live. Dust modeling needs field observations to test theories on dust emission. To date, most measurements do not provide enough information to allow for a determination of the dust emission mechanism and often focus on a small variety of soil and atmospheric settings. Hence, the evaluation of dust emission schemes has so far relied on a selective set of observations. Here, I present results of a study that aims to decipher dust emission mechanisms from field measurements as an input for future model development. Detailed field measurements, which include monitoring of the surface, loose erodible material, transported sediment, and meteorological parameters, were conducted for a range of environmental conditions in the southwestern United States. In the context of the observed atmospheric forcing, differences and similarities between the particle-size characteristics of surface and transported sediment samples are used to differentiate between the different dust emission mechanisms.