That's also interresting cause you have a different vison of desert than me, the colours are different. I get the same feeling with your other desert maps and Viking too. I would tone down it a little, but that's just my personal like. Maybe you should start thinking to use resolution 2 on load.ini as your textures are nice it would help for low flight.
Just 2 little "bugs" i discovered, some bildings in the water but nothing really important. Check the minimap for the location :
I heard about the houses in the water ... my fault for not removing all the 'working objects' when populating. When I hear of more faults to correct, then it will the time to post a new actors.
On desert colors: when you go around looking at photos there are so many tints to any given landscape, deserts especially, that you can really sort of choose your preference - a brown desert, or gray, sand, rock, reddish ... they all go if you want.
I just choose this reddish tint because it was something different and I had a whole set of them to choose from, making it easier to harmonize the colors and tints. I think it's fun to have different texture sets and clearly differing color ranges on each map, if possible. Though certain textures will be found used on different maps, maybe adjusting the colors to blend in with the others. These textures are btw, mainly from the Horn of Africa and immediate area around Somalia as on GE. So, they are appropriate in a way I suppose.
I see that your screencaps are very crisp and hard. You must be one of those Mad Dogs or Englishman who come out in the noonday sun ... ha ha. I guess your gapa gamma settings or avala lightmat settings are different from mine too, since I usually get softer and more hazier landscapes when flying. I really like the late afternoon for flying, especially in deserts ... you also get a different range of colors for the landscape, especially with poor or blind weather conditions.