Today’s post is a reprint of recent story by Carol Rasmussen of NASA’s Earth Science News Team.
NASA has produced the first three-dimensional numerical model of melting snowflakes in the atmosphere. Developed by scientist Jussi Leinonen of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the model provides a better understanding of how snow melts. This can help scientists recognize the signature (in radar signals) of heavier, wetter snow — the kind that snaps power lines and tree limbs — and could be a step toward improving predictions of this hazard.
Leinonen’s model reproduces key features of melting snowflakes that have been observed in nature. First, meltwater gathers in any concave regions of the snowflake’s surface. These liquid-water regions then merge to form a shell of liquid around an ice core, and finally develop into a water drop. The modeled snowflake shown in the video is less than half an inch (one centimeter) long and composed of many individual ice crystals whose arms became entangled when they collided in midair.
Leinonen said he got interested in modeling melting snow because of the way it affects observations with remote sensing instruments. A radar “profile” of the atmosphere from top to bottom shows a very bright, prominent layer at the altitude where falling snow and hail melt — much brighter than atmospheric layers above and below it. “The reasons for this layer are still not particularly clear, and there has been a bit of debate in the community,” Leinonen said. Simpler models can reproduce the bright melt layer, but a more detailed model like this one can help scientists to understand it better, particularly how the layer is related to both the type of melting snow and the radar wavelengths used to observe it.
A paper on the numerical model, titled “Snowflake melting simulation using smoothed particle hydrodynamics,” recently appeared in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres.