Most snow does not lie flat. Instead, the wind shapes and organizes it into many patterns, like dunes, ripples, or anvil-shaped sastrugi. These features are widespread across ice caps and tundra, and where they form, they dramatically alter the surface energy fluxes and thermodynamics.
See my 14-minute summary talk here:
You can also read about this work in my papers:
- What are snow bedforms? What do they look like? How do they grow?
‘The evolution of snow bedforms in the Colorado Front Range’, The Cryosphere, 2019. https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-1267-2019 - Can we predict when snow bedforms will form?
‘Statistical classification of self-organized snow surfaces’, Geophysical Research Letters, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL077616 - Can we simulate snow bedform growth?
‘Rescal-snow: simulating snow dune growth with cellular automata’, Journal of Open Source Software, 2019. https://github.com/kellykochanski/rescal-snow - How do dunes influence snow thermodynamics?
‘Snow dunes increase polar heat fluxes’, under review.
As a heads up, I am now working in a different field and not actively pursuing this line of research. However, I am delighted to talk about it and to support up-and-coming snow scientists.