Sunday 16 December 2012

Wonders of Winter: Solid water

 


For a summer hydrologist winter is the "borring" time. Depending on the catchment location precipitation is solid and the catchment is in deep winter sleep without any reaction with only some liters of base flow. zzzz zzzz zzz 
Warm inside with a warm cup of coffee and x-mas sweets its nice to work on last seasons field data and see what happened. While working and thinking some times the falling snow flakes divert the attention and makes one wonder. Not only the light isotopic values of precipitation but even more: the self organizing abilities of water. So looking outside the office window one sees a former cage from the ecology section where snow build a dome shape structure on top of the fine mesh of the fence without falling down on top of the building below. Still wondering how this is possible... Any clue?



Fig 1. Look down to the former cage. In orange a grid made from beams and a smaller fence in between in green.
Fig. Different perspective to show the snow cover thickness.






Fig. 3 Schematic view with top view of the fence. View a-a shows the distance of the fence grid and the building of the dome shape structure of snow.