Author Description

Snow sintering has not been studied extensively, despite its potentially significant effects on the fate of pollutants in the natural environment. The present research focused on quantifying the sintering of both artificial and natural snow. Snow sintering was found to follow an exponential decay function, and was strongly temperature-dependent. As expected, the rate of snow sintering decreased with the decrease in temperature. Sintering rate of natural snow was much higher than that of artificial snow. The presence of SO2 gas accelerated snow sintering at -20°C and -35°C. At the lower temperature however, the effect of SO2 on snow sintering was weaker. SO2 uptake capacities were highly dependent of snow types; natural snow was much more capable of uptaking SO2 than artificial snow. This difference indicated the importance of the QLL in sorbing soluble gases. The higher uptake capacity of natural snow was attributed to the oxidative species in natural snow samples.