When I was a student, Martin told me matter-of-factly that snow is hot. I probably looked as baffled as I felt (and you are probably doing the same). Were we talking about the same thing? Continue reading to discover why snow is hot! Discovering that snow is hot So why is snow hot? Most snow under Earth’s environmental conditions has a homologous temperature Th close to 1. The homologous temperatu ...[Read More]
Did you know that snow is hot?
Figure 1: MicroCT images of fresh snow on melting sea ice during the late summer phase of the MOSAiC expedition a) and snow at the same location six hours later (b). The large structures at the bottom of a) show the melting sea ice surface, also known as the surface scattering layer. [Credit: Ruzica Dadic]