SNOW - Atmosphere Interactions and Snow Modelling
Snow is a fascinating material and greatly influences the earth surface, its exchange with the atmosphere, current and future climate as well as natural hazards. This presentation reviews our current understanding of snow deposition and snow transport and how this influences both the mass balance of the global cryosphere and atmospheric predictions. Snow dynamics on the ground are equally interesting and challenging. The detailed snow cover model SNOWPACK is used in many applications from avalanche forecasting to climate change predictions. Some of these applications are presented together with new results on water transport in snow, which show that preferential water flow through snow is generating important effects on snow ablation in mountains as well as for firn dynamics on big ice sheets.
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