Case study of blowing snow potential diagnosis with dynamical downscaling

Abstract

Blowing snow potential is diagnosed for typical cases around Sapporo, Japan, as snow concentration and visibility based on dynamically downscaled data with 1-km resolution. The results are consistent with the blowing-snow records on time and place of traffic disruption, when the dynamical downscaling (DDS) reproduced wind speed well for a case. The diagnosis with mesoscale model analysis with 5-km resolution does not reproduce the blowing snow events in most area, however. Hence, the DDS potentially, not perfectly, adds the value to estimate blowing snow potential, despite a large scale-gap from an explicit representation of small-scale turbulence related to blowing snow. Sensitivity tests clarify that blowing snow requires strong wind and freezing temperature at the surface.