In the last few months, I’ve worked with undergraduate Adam Rubin to turn a sand dune model into snow.
We started with ReSCAL, a cellular automaton that models geophysical interfaces, and brought in some optimizations that I worked on at LLNL last summer.
This fall, I adjusted the model parameters to handle snow densities and particle sizes. Adam added a model component that injects snow particles along the top edge of the model domain.
You can see an example simulation below:
I ran this simulation on the LLNL supercomputer quartz, and rendered it in Paraview. Surface height is colored. All of the snow particles fall from the top of the simulation, while the wind drives them from left to right.
We plan to use this work to create a full phase diagram of snow bedform shape as a function of wind speed and snowfall rate.