Despite being ubiquitous in the Mackenzie River Basin (MRB) of Canada, the role of snow in its energy and water budgets are still open to much speculation. This thesis presents a multi-scale analysis of the contribution of blowing snow to the hydrometeorology of the MRB. A climatology of adverse wintertime weather events is first presented and demonstrates that blowing snow events are rare within the forested sections of the MRB but become more frequent in the northern parts of the basin covered by Arctic tundra. It is these areas which experience the largest impacts of blowing snow transport and sublimation due to large-scale processes. To further assess the mesoscale and microscale effects of blowing snow to the northern regions of the MRB, the development of a bulk blowing snow model is then described. The single- and double-moment versions of the PIEKTUK blowing snow model are shown to produce equivalent results as a previous spectral version of the numerical model while operating about 100 times faster. The application of the double-moment PIEKTUK model (PIEKTUK-D) to a Canadian Arctic tundra site near the northern tip of the MRB reveals that blowing snow sublimation depletes ≈3 mm snow water equivalent (swe) from the snowpack over a period of 210 days during the winter of 1996/1997 at Trail Valley Creek, Northwest Territories. Various assumptions on the state of the background thermodynamic profiles and their evolution during blowing snow, however, can yield significantly higher (>300%) rates of sublimation over the same period. PIEKTUK-D is then coupled to the Mesoscale Compressible Community (MC2) model for an interactive simulation of a ground blizzard at Trail Valley Creek. This coupled mesoscale simulation reveals that moistening and cooling of near-surface air associated with blowing snow sublimation is observed but mitigated in part by advective and entrainment processes. Combined, blowing snow sublimation and mass divergence are then shown to rem
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.36909 |
| Date | January 2001 |
| Creators | Dery, Stephen J. |
| Contributors | Yau, M. R. (Peter) (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001809570, proquestno: NQ70002, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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