United States Department of Transportation
i
Historical Winter Weather Assessment for Snow Fence Design Using a Numerical Weather Model
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2017-03-30
[PDF-2.51 MB]
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Abstract:Noriaki Ohara, Ph.D., Assistant Professor (0000-0002-7829-0779)
Snow fence is an effective hazard mitigation measure for the low visibility and low friction of the road surface under
winter weather condition. Prevailing wind directions and snow precipitation data prepared by Dr. R. Tabler (the
Tabler data) that are necessary for snow fence design have not been updated since the 1990s. This project provides
new, seamless wind field and snow precipitation data under the adverse winter storm conditions during 1980-2014,
using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) data
input. The simulated wind fields were successfully validated by using the observed data from airport sites and using
the Tabler data. The WRF simulated precipitation data were assimilated to the observation-based PRISM data in
order to obtain the accurate hourly snow precipitation data. Combining all the weather variables, the number of
blowing snow events is found to be increasing despite the increasing air temperature because of the sufficiently cold
winters of Wyoming. Finally, it was verified that the existing snow fence system is effective under the winter season
prevailing wind since the simulation agrees with the Tabler data. However, it was also found that the simulated wind
patterns during the blowing snow events can be quite different from the winter season average prevailing wind field.
Moreover, the historical wind statistics indicated large deviations in wind direction along I-80.
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