Corralling Blowing Snow
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When driving a car through a whiteout with wind-whipped snow, you might as well have your eyes shut. But researchers are finding ways to get blowing snow out of the way. Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook. On a recent visit to Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab, or CRREL, in Hanover, NH, researcher Jim Lever showed me how he studies these zero visibility curtains of snow.
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| The wind tunnel is used by scientists at CRREL to study the effects of drifting snow. CRREL |
DT: And so, and also too, if they plow something I imagine they don't want the snow coming back on.
JL: Yeah, it will drift back in and so handling the snow when you're plowing becomes a major issue."
To better handle snow, Jim and his colleagues at CRREL run model tests simulating a blowing snowstorm:
"This is our environmental wind tunnel. It's about 4 foot high by 8 foot wide about 50 feet long and it's used to model snow drifting around buildings, other structures, open terrain at fairly small scales."
Using tiny glass beads about a tenth of a millimeter in size to replicate snow, the wind tunnel demonstrates how blowing snow will behave during different wind and topography conditions.
"Well, right now, we're working on a project to model snow drifting over terrain features including road cuts and fills, hills and vegetation."
By using these models, CRREL has found that snow fences literally block the wind from blowing across roads. We'll talk about that tomorrow, right here on The Weather Notebook.
Our show is underwritten by Subaru with major support provided by the National Science Foundation.