Modeling Dry-Snow Densification without Abrupt Transition

Snow densification during rain

Observations and measurements indicate rain often has a major impact on snow slope stability. Measurements to investigate the effects of wetting of low density, alpine snow were made at Snoqualmie Pass, WA, USA. Results indicate that on first wetting, the densification rate can increase by three orders of magnitude. This initial burst of densification occurs independently of the gravitational l...

A dry snow pack model

A dry snow pack is viewed as an interacting mixture of rigid ice grains and air occupying the pore space in the matrix. The three-dimensional mass, momentum and energy balances are formulated within the framework of interacting continua theory. The assumption of a common ice and air temperature is made to reflect the very slow relative motion between the air and ice. Focusing on a one-dimension...

Particle Rearrangement and Dislocation Creep in a Snow-densification Process

Spatiotemporal Characteristics of Dry-Wet Abrupt Transition Based on Precipitation in Poyang Lake Basin, China

The dry-wet abrupt transition (DWAT) is a typical anomaly of precipitation at the subseasonal scale and may result in a severer and greater hydro-meteorological hazard. This paper identified and examined the DWAT events in terms of precipitation in Poyang Lake basin, including both from dry to wet (DTW) and from wet to dry (WTD), during the period of 1960–2010 and analyzed its characteristics o...

Size scaling for dry snow slab release

[1] Sandpile avalanches were used first to illustrate the concept of self-organized criticality (SOC). Snow avalanches consist of two types: (1) loose snow avalanches which release in cohesionless material at the top of the snowpack and (2) slab avalanches which release by propagation of shear fractures originating in a thin weak layer at depth in the snowpack. Loose snow avalanches are analogo...