Aside from being cold, snowflakes are well-known for their unique shapes. New research illuminates how these lovely crystals fall to the ground. When the air is still snowflakes gently drift to the surface, but on other occasions they get violently tossed about by wind and other forms of precipitation. While this can be beautiful to observe, it also adds an element of the unpredictable to snowstorms — although a group of researchers at the University of Utah may have helped change that forever.
According to a recent study published in the journal Physics of Fluids, scientists can actually anticipate how snowflakes will fall during different types of air turbulence, something that atmospheric modelers previously struggled to do. After much research, the scientists found that they simply had to use the Stokes number for the snowflakes. A Stokes number is a dimensionless figure that determines the behavior of particles suspended in a fluid flow. Such a straightforward solution may seem counterintuitive because, as the authors noted, snowflakes come in so many individual shapes and sizes.
