Abstract:

A field work was conducted at Moshiri in Japan. The work included intensive snow pit work, taking snow grain photos, recording snow and air temperatures, as well as measuring snow water content. By treating the snow as a viscous fluid, it is found that the snow compactive viscosity decreases as the density increases, which is opposite to the relation for dry snow. Based on the measurements of snow grain size, it is shown that, similar to the watersaturated snow, the frequency distributions of grain size at different times almost have the same shape. This reveals that the waterunsaturated melting snow holds the same graincoarsening behavior as the watersaturated snow does. It is also shown that the waterunsaturated melting snow coarsens much more slowly than the watersaturated snow. The C value, which is the viscosity when the snow density is zero, is related to the mean grain size and found to decrease with increasing grain size. The decreasing rate of C value increases with decreasing graincoarsening rate.

Key words: Melting snow, densification, grain coarsening