Good Job! it looks pretty good. specially colors.
i made a desert scene some months ago and i actually made it with world machine,i guess my reference was a lot different from yours!
i didint use tesselation, it was slow and unnecessary i used POM instead.
also use a sand texture for specular and roughness it can make the sand feels a lot better
i didn’t finish the scene as it was just a little test but here is my last result
after adding cloud and playing with post process a bit.
