Abstract
Wind-driven redistribution of snow is one of the key factors leading to
heterogeneous accumulation of snow at small scales. Understanding these
processes is, therefore, of great importance to many glaciological and
hydrological questions. High-quality information on the wind field is
necessary to realistically represent drifting snow. Here, we introduce a
novel, intermediate-complexity drifting and blowing snow module for the
Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model that integrates seamlessly
into the standard WRF infrastructure. The module also accounts for snow
particle sublimation and considers the thermodynamic feedback on the
atmospheric fields. The module was tested in an idealized model
environment. The simple and computationally efficient implementation
allows this module to be used for small-scale and large-scale
simulations in polar and glaciated regions.