EESS Seminar talk on "Blowing snow particles interaction with frozen hydrometeors in alpine regions"

Atmospheric models are known to fail in reproducing the large gap that exists between measured ice nucleating particles and Ice Crystal Number Concentrations (ICNC) in alpine regions. Improvements have been made by including different sources of secondary ice production mechanisms into the models. Blowing snow has been identified as an additional source of ice particles, potentially playing a crucial role in secondary ice production and cloud microphysics. Driven by these assumptions, we performed an set of simulations using the snow-atmosphere coupled model CRYOWRF. First, comparison with observed data confirmed the positive contribution of secondary ice production and revealed the importance of blowing snow particles. Second, the added collisions between blowing snow particles and other frozen hydrometeors (cloud ice, snow, and graupel) show a significant generation of cloud ice particles. However, the net relative increase in total ICNC remains marginal as the overall sum is dominated by the abundant blowing snow particles. This work strenghtens the importance of blowing snow in alpine regions, and is the starting point to investigate its influence on precipitation and snow redistribution.
 

My research spans fluid mechanics, applied mathematics, and environmental physics. After earning a master degree in Energy Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, I completed a 9-month research stay at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, investigating turbulent wakes using particle image velocimetry. I hold a PhD in Applied Mathematics focused on boundary layer instability theory, followed by a postdoc in industrial optimization where I developed optimal and heuristic models. Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher at CRYOS, using numerical models to investigate blowing snow processes in alpine and polar environments