A distributed model of blowing snow over complex terrain

✍ Scribed by Richard Essery; Long Li; John Pomeroy

• Book ID: 102658969
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 901 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0885-6087
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-1085(199910)13:14/15<2423::aid-hyp853>3.0.co;2-u

✦ Synopsis

Physically-based models of blowing snow and wind¯ow are used to develop a distributed model of blowing snow transport and sublimation over complex terrain. The model is applied to an arctic tundra basin. A reasonable agreement with results from snow surveys is obtained, provided sublimation processes are included; a simulation without sublimation produces much greater snow accumulations than were measured. The model is able to reproduce some observed features of redistributed snowcovers: distributions of snow mass, classi®ed by vegetation type and landform, can be approximated by lognormal distributions, and standard deviations of snow mass along transects follow a power law with transect length up to a cut-o. The representation used for the downwind development of blowing snow with changes in windspeed and surface characteristics is found to have a large moderating in¯uence on snow redistribution.