The focus of this year's expedition was to measure the water properties at the boundary between the ice shelf and the Southern Ocean. The Antarctic ice sheet gains mass through snowfall, and loses it through a variety of processes. Melting occurs where ocean water that is warmer than the in-situ freezing point (about -1.8 C) comes into contact with the bottoms of ice shelves and at ice sheet grounding lines (the zone where the ice sheet changes from sitting on bedrock to floating on the ocean).

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The microstructure of food is a critical factor in determining its taste, consistency and appearance. Against this background, scientists from Nestlé and the SLF snow physics research group joined forces a short time ago to investigate how the crystal structure of ice cream changes at different temperatures. The researchers used the computer tomograph in the cold laboratory of the SLF, which has proven a valuable instrument for examining the microstructure of snow.

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When Switzerland's athletes compete for medals at the 2014 Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, the SLF will be part of the team as well. Local snow and weather forecasts produced by the SLF will enable the team to prepare their competition skis in the best possible way.

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Snow cornices up to several meters high impressively show how strong the wind influences the snow cover in mountains. SLF investigates where the wind erodes and deposits snow and how the snow changes during transport through experiments in a wind tunnel and at the Weissfluhjoch Versuchsfeld.

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In the SLF boundary-layer wind-tunnel the characteristics of saltation are investigated. In particular, the snow particle size distribution, the snow mass concentration and the intermittency of snow transport are addressed. Additionally, particle trajectories of drifting snow, i.e. their ejection/impact velocities and angles, heights, distances, and curvatures are studied.

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How are the crystals in snow oriented? While micro-computed tomography measures precisely the snow microstructure, thin layers (sections) give information about the orientation of the ice crystals.

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In the mountains, snow is distributed very unevenly; enormous variations frequently occur over a very small area. For the first time, SLF researchers have now succeeded in characterising this variability with the aid of a relatively simple statistical model. The technique has the capacity to improve the forecasting of high and low water levels in future.

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Alpine3D is a spatially distributed (surface), three dimensional (atmospheric) model for analyzing and predicting dynamics of snow-dominated surface processes in mountainous topography. It includes models for snow cover, vegetation and soil, snow transport, radiation transfer and runoff which can be enabled or disabled on demand. The model supports a variety of input options including interpolation of meteorological weather stations, input from a meteorological model or from remote sensing data (MeteoIO) and has been parallelized in order to run on computing grids or clusters.

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Höher, schneller, weiter. Mit diesem Anspruch reisen im Februar Spitzenathleten aus aller Welt zu den Olympischen Winterspielen nach Vancouver. Damit die Schweizer im Ziel die entscheidenden Millimeter vorne liegen, arbeitet das SLF eng mit Sportverbänden und Ausrüstern zusammen.

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The aim of this project is the accurate prediction of the spatial distribution of local surface temperatures in mountainous terrain, what is in particular of interest for a detailed winter surface energy balance for avalanche formation and road surface condition prediction. It is found that a detailed surface radiation balance is essential.

Available languages: English