Abstract
Like other outdoor sports, skiing requires a playing field. That playing field may be provided by nature in the form of a covering of snow. Out of the desire for an adequate playing field, we have contrived to make artificial snow to replace or augment the natural stuff when it refuses to appear in sufficient quantity or, tragically, refuses to appear at all. Most of the alpine skiers of the world practice their sport on carefully prepared slopes on which natural as well as manufactured snow is first packed and then later scored or groomed. Daily maintenance of the slopes’ surfaces ensures the uniformly good skiing conditions alpine skiers expect for the price of their lift tickets. Organized nordic ski facilities likewise provide skiers with groomed tracks and courses. When adventure skiers take to the hills or mountains, they likely will seek out particular snow conditions—usually powder, the deeper the better—but they must ski through whatever snow conditions they may find along the way.
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References
For more on this subject, see J. Chen and V. Kevorkian, “Heat and Mass Transfer in Making Artificial Snow,” Ind. Eng. Chem. Process Des. Develop. 10, 75 (1971).
For more on the subject of making artificial snow using bacterial nucleates, see R. Fall and P. K. Wolber, “Biochemistry of Bacterial Ice Nuclei,” in Biological Ice Nucleation and Its Applications, edited by R. E. Lee Jr., G. J. Warren, and L. V. Gusta (APS Press, St. Paul, MN, 1995), pp. 63–83;
R. J. LaDuca, A. F. Rice, and P. J. Ward, “Applications of Biological Ice Nucleation in Spray-Ice Technology,” ibid. pp. 337–350. Our discussion of this topic is generally indebted to these sources.
For a summary and discussion of observational studies of snowpacks and the processes associated with their different characteristics, see S. C. Colbeck, “A Review of Sintering in Seasonal Snow Cover,” CRREL Report No. 97–10 (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, Hanover, NH, December, 1997).
This process is described by J. G. Dash in “Surface Melting,” Contemporary Physics, 30 (1989), 89–100.
An international classification system describes the varieties of snow found on the ground. It is used primarily by the various professionals who work with snow and avalanche control for ski areas, transportation departments, and so on. For more information on this subject, see S. Colbeck, E. Akitaya, R. Armstrong, H. Gubler, J. Lafeuille, K. Lied, D. McClung, and E. Morris, International Classification for Seasonal Snow on the Ground (International Commission for Snow and Ice, World Data Center for Glaciology, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, 1990).
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© 2004 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Lind, D.A., Sanders, S.P. (2004). Snow: The Playing Field. In: The Physics of Skiing. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-4345-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-4345-6_2
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