Nature’s Polar Design Challenge: Drifting Snow Bill Waechter Snow Misconception - A popular belief is that snow can drift across great distances...‘from one community to the next’, some will say. The reality is that it does not. Snow will sublimate (evaporate) and erode as it is blown about and will ‘disappear’ within a 5 to 6 km journey. The drift patterns shown in the aerial photo demonstrate the impor- tance of addressing the effects of wind blown snow in subdivision planning and street orientation. Imagine the challenges if a street was located immediately downwind of the first row of houses. Streets must remain unobstructed throughout the year for emergency and service vehicles (water, sewage, heating fuel). Building-lined streets perpendicu- lar to the wind produce more snow drift related problems for traffic than do streets parallel with the prevailing winds. Several planning-related solutions are available to reduce snow clear- ing costs. Eventually houses will be placed on the windward side of perimeter streets; however development controls can dictate that these houses be constructed last, or at least not first. Current site planning practice locates building service connections (water, sewage, heating fuel oil) on the same side of every house on the street; site planning could encourage designs where service connections on adjacent homes face one another. Presently, snow must be cleared from the service area on each property, whereas adjacent service connections would reduce snow removal to one service area between every other house along a street.
b lowing snow in Arctic and Antarctic regions presents a design challenge unique to these extreme cold areas. More temperate regions have periodic thaws throughout the winter that generally keep overall accumulations of snow on roads and around structures at a tolerable level. In polar regions snow typically stays for seven to nine months, even from one year to the next. Severe and ever-present, drifting snow is a major factor in the design of subdivisions, roads and buildings. The aerial photograph above provides an excellent overview of drift- ing conditions in a typical polar community. The prevailing wind flows from the top left of the photo to the bottom right. The first row of houses on the windward side of the community (top left) disrupted the approaching wind flow and caused numerous large snow drifts to form. Moving further into the community, towards the bottom right of the photo, fewer drifts are visible. The first row of houses initially encoun - tered by the wind is effectively a snow fence for the rest of the com- munity. The photographs below (Baker Lake, NU) illustrate the severity of drift conditions typically encountered around the first row of houses on the windward side of a community. Aerial view of snow drifting conditions in a typical polar community.
The same houses without snow.
Drifting between the first and second row of windward houses in Baker Lake, Nunuvut. Wind is from the left.
On Site review 11
66
Spring 2004
Architecture of the Circumpolar Region
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