Case Study of Blowing Snow Potential Diagnosis with Dynamical Downscaling

Blowing snow potential is diagnosed for typical cases in roads around Sapporo, Japan, as snow concentration and visibility based on dynamically downscaled data with 1-km resolution. The results are consistent with the blowing-snow records on time and place of traffic disruption, when the dynamical downscaling (DDS) reproduced wind speed well for a case. Moreover, the DDS-based diagnosis had a strength on the onset and cease of blowing snow in the event. The diagnosis with mesoscale model analysis with 5-km resolution does not reproduce the blowing snow events in most area, however. Hence, the DDS potentially, not perfectly, adds the value to estimate blowing snow potential, despite a large scale-gap from an explicit representation of small-scale turbulence related to blowing snow. The meteorological forecast with 1-km resolution might improve the estimate of blowing snow potential.