McMurdo Snow Roads and Transportation : final program summary

Abstract

The snow roads at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, are the primary transportation corridors for moving personnel and material to and from the airfields servicing intra- and intercontinental air traffic. The majority of the road system is made of snow overlying a snow, firn, and icy subsurface and is particularly susceptible to deterioration during the warmest parts of the austral summer when above-freezing temperatures can occur for several days at a time. Poor snow-road conditions can seriously limit payloads for all types of ground vehicles. The US Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) studied the McMurdo snow roads for the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs as part of the Snow Roads and Transportation (SRT) program. The goals of the SRT program was to improve construction, maintenance, and use of the McMurdo’s snow roads, with particular attention on minimizing warm-season deterioration. This is the final report of the SRT program, summarizing the program’s activities and findings and emphasizing those parts of the program not previously documented in CRREL Reports, conference papers, or journal articles.

Comparative analysis of FEM tire-soft snow interaction and theoretical model based on Bekker’s coefficients

“…An important physical parameter of snow is represented by the snow density. According to Shoop [12], the snow density can vary from 100 kg/m 3 IOP Publishing doi:10.1088/1757-899X/1303/1/012046 3 (fresh snow) to 600 kg/m 3 (snowpack subjected to melt-freeze cycles), however the compacted snow that automobiles can experience is typically classified as having a density ranging from 370 to 560 kg/m 3 . In order to verify the accuracy of the FEM snow model, a load-sinkage convergence test was conducted.…”