When wind blows over snow, it self-organizes. This forms surface features, such as ripples and dunes, that alter the reflectivity and thermal conductivity of the snow.
These features have just begun to be studied by the snow and climate science communities (see 1, 2, 3 for recent work).
I created rescal-snow, with a group of other students and staff at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to provide a highly capable snow dune modelling toolkit, to enable snow scientists to study snow features in controlled numerical experiments, and produce high-quality quantitative output. We hope that this model will be useful to researchers in snow science, geomorphology, and polar climate.
You can read more and download the model from https://github.com/kellykochanski/rescal-snow.
