snowBedFoam: an OpenFOAM Eulerian-Lagrangian solver for modelling snow transport

snowBedFoam 1.0. is a snow transport solver implemented in the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software OpenFOAM. It is adapted from the standard multi-phase flow solver DPMFoam for application in snow-influenced environments.

To simulate aeolian snow transport, snowBedFoam 1.0. handles coupled Eulerian–Lagrangian phases, which involve a finite number of particles (snow) spread in a continuous phase (air). The snow erosion and deposition are modelled through physically-based equations such as the ones employed in the well-established LES-Lagrangian Stochastic Model (Comola and Lehning, 2017 ; Sharma et al., 2018). This modelling approach is computationally intensive and thus adapted to simulate snow movement and distribution on small scale terrain.

snowBedFoam 1.0. was tested against topographical data collected on Arctic sea ice during the MOSAiC expedition (Clemens-Sewall, 2021) . Together with atmospheric data from the MOSAiC Met City (Shupe et al., 2021) used for the fluid forcing, the model was able to accurately simulate the zones of erosion and deposition of snow along a complex ice ridge structure.

The core code of snowBedFoam 1.0. is also accessible on the WSL/SLF GitLab repository (more details in the Resources section).