摘要： A novel method combining terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) with chemometrics was proposed for classification of sand samples from different deserts and grain sizes. THz-TDS combined with chemometrics was firstly utilized for identifying the source of sand samples and analyzing the sizes of sand granule. Terahertz time-domain transmittance spectra were collected and then Savitzky–Golay smoothing and orthogonal signal correction (OSC) approaches were used for spectral pretreatment. Principal component analysis, partial least squares discriminant analysis, and support vector machine were used to establish classification models of the sand samples. The prediction correctness ranged between 94 and 97%. Scanning electron microscopy was used to investigate the morphology of the sand samples. The sand samples were analyzed by energy dispersive spectroscopy and the elemental content distributions were obtained. Fourier transform infrared absorption spectra of the sand samples were also collected. THz-TDS combined with multivariate modeling methods provided reliable and useful information to determine the provenance of the sands originated from different deserts in northern China. This work reveals that THz-TDS can be a useful tool for classification of sand from different deserts.