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Rescal-snow is a branch of the 3D-multiphysics Real-space Cellular Automaton Laboratory (ReSCAL), extended to model self-organized snow surfaces and to be optimized for use on various LLNL computing architectures.
Wind-blown snow self-organizes. It forms ripples, dunes (in video below), and anvil-shaped features called sastrugi.
These features cover a large fraction of the surface of the Earth, on ice sheets, sea ice, and polar tundra. They roughen the surface, which changes its energy balances and interactions with the global atmosphere and climate.
Despite these effects, self-organized snow features have attracted little scientific attention. The physical processes which form them are not well known, and have never been explicitly modeled. This leaves us with a large space of unanswered scientific questions, many of which may inform climate models or prompt new futures studies into a process which covers much of the surface of the Earth.
ReSCAL 1.6 was originally developed by the Geomorphology team and the Laboratoire de Dynamique des Fluides Géologiques, within the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris.
ReSCAL has been used to model a variety of geophysical surfaces, including river networks, granular flow, and simple fluid flows. It has been used to obtain important results in sand dune physics.