Abstract
AbstractThis paper investigates how snowdrift influences the wind speed profile on the basis of meteorological and snowdrift data collected over an Antarctic snow surface during the austral summer. The friction associated with saltating snowdrift is found to significantly affect the wind speed profile by enhancing the apparent surface roughness. Several aspects of the wind speed data suggest the existence of the particle buoyancy effect associated with suspended snow particles. This effect has been theoretically predicted for snowdrift and experimentally verified for other two‐phase flows (e.g. suspended sediment in water). The observed impact of snowdrift saltation and suspension on the wind speed gradient, the total buoyancy and turbulent production rate are compared with theoretical/empirical estimates of the impact of saltation effects and particle buoyancy in suspension. It is shown that the particle buoyancy effect in snowdrift is very probably real and non‐negligible, but winds were not strong enough to demonstrate this conclusively.
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