The Fallacy of Drifting Snow

Abstract

A common parametrization over snow-covered surfaces that are undergoing saltation is that the aerodynamic roughness length for wind speed (z ₀) scales as ${\alpha u_\ast^2/g}$, where u _* is the friction velocity, g is the acceleration of gravity, and α is an empirical constant. Data analyses seem to support this scaling: many published plots of z ₀ measured over snow demonstrate proportionality to ${u_\ast^2 }$. In fact, I show similar plots here that are based on two large eddy-covariance datasets: one collected over snow-covered Arctic sea ice; another collected over snow-covered Antarctic sea ice. But in these and in most such plots from the literature, the independent variable, u _*, was used to compute z ₀ in the first place; the plots thus suffer from fictitious correlation that causes z ₀ to unavoidably increase with u _* without any intervening physics. For these two datasets, when I plot z ₀ against u _* derived from a bulk flux algorithm—and thus minimize the fictitious correlation—z ₀ is independent of u _* in the drifting snow region, u _* ≥ 0.30 ms⁻¹. I conclude that the relation ${z_0 = \alpha u_\ast^2/g}$ when snow is drifting is a fallacy fostered by analyses that suffer from fictitious correlation.