• Wind and Structures
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.31-47
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• 2019

The accurate prediction of snow distributions under the wind action on roofs plays an important role in designing structures in civil engineering in regions with heavy snowfall. Affected by some factors such as building shapes, sizes and layouts, the snow drifting on roofs shows more three-dimensional characteristics. Thus, the research on three-dimensional snow distribution is needed. Firstly, four groups of stepped flat roofs are designed, of which the width-height ratio is 3, 4, 5 and 6. Silica sand with average radius of 0.1 mm is used to model the snow particles and then the wind tunnel test of snow drifting on stepped flat roofs is carried out. 3D scanning is used to obtain the snow distribution after the test is finished and the mean mass transport rate is calculated. Next, the wind velocity and duration is determined for numerical simulations based on similarity criteria. The adaptive-mesh method based on radial basis function (RBF) interpolation is used to simulate the dynamic change of snow phase boundary on lower roofs and then a time-marching analysis of steady snow drifting is conducted. The overall trend of numerical results are generally consistent with the wind tunnel tests and field measurements, which validate the accuracy of the numerical simulation. The combination between the wind tunnel test and CFD simulation for three-dimensional typical roofs can provide certain reference to the prediction of the distribution of snow loads on typical roofs.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.453-469
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• 2021

Snow accumulation on the road frequently induces a big traffic problem in the cold snowy region. Accurate prediction on snow distribution is fundamental for solving drifting snow disasters on roads. The present study adopts the transient method to simulate the wind-induced snow distribution on embankment based on the mixture multiphase model and dynamic mesh technique. The simulation and field measurement are compared to confirm the applicability of the simulation. Furthermore, the process of snow accumulation is revealed. The effects of friction velocity and snow concentration on snow accumulation are analyzed to clarify its mechanism. The results show that the simulation agrees well with the field measurement in trends. Moreover, the snow accumulation on the embankment can be approximately divided into three stages with time, the snow firstly deposited on the windward side, then, accumulation occurs on the leeward side which induced by the wake vortex, finally, the snow distribution reaches an equilibrium state with the slope of approximately 7°. The friction velocity and duration have a significant influence on the snow accumulation, and the vortex scale directly affected the snow deposition range on the embankment leeward side.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2008.10a
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• pp.301-304
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• 2008

Since longer wavelength microwave radiation can penetrate clouds, satellite passive microwave sensors can observe sea ice of the entire polar region on a daily basis. Thus, it is becoming popular to derive sea ice motion vectors from a pair of satellite passive microwave sensor images observed at one or few day interval. Usually, the accuracies of derived vectors are validated by comparing with the position data of drifting buoys. However, the number of buoys for validation is always quite limited compared to a large number of vectors derived from satellite images. In this study, the sea ice motion vectors automatically derived from pairs of AMSR-E 89GHz images (IFOV = 3.5 ${\times}$ 5.9km) by an image-to-image cross correlation were validated by comparing with sea ice motion vectors manually derived from pairs of cloudless MODIS images (IFOV=250 ${\times}$ 250m). Since AMSR-E and MODIS are both on the same Aqua satellite of NASA, the observation time of both sensors are the same. The relative errors of AMSR-E vectors against MODIS vectors were calculated. The accuracy validation has been conducted for 5 scenes. If we accept relative error of less than 30% as correct vectors, 75% to 92% of AMSR-E vectors derived from one scene were correct. On the other hand, the percentage of correct sea ice vectors derived from a pair of SSM/I 85GHz images (IFOV = 15 ${\times}$ 13km) observed nearly simultaneously with one of the AMSR-E images was 46%. The difference of the accuracy between AMSR-E and SSM/I is reflecting the difference of IFOV. The accuracies of H and V polarization were different from scene to scene, which may reflect the difference of sea ice distributions and their snow cover of each scene.