Snow shoo: Not so fast

LYNN – Yes, it’s beautiful as it falls, but the snow has started to wear out its welcome. Unfortunately, it’s not likely to go anywhere soon.”Even if we finally do go above freezing, which is a ways away, we’re still not going to see any melting anytime soon,” National Weather Service Meteorologist Bill Simpson said Monday. “It’s going to remain below freezing, or well below freezing, and we’re in an active weather pattern where we’ll likely have more snow added to it.”This weekend’s storm made this the third-snowiest winter in Boston history, with 95.7 inches of snow recorded so far. The Weather Channel reported that 85 inches of that snow has fallen within the last 23 days.Needless to say, people are getting kind of sick of it. But Simpson said we should get used to the snow because we’re going to be seeing it for awhile.Simpson explained that the optimal weather conditions for melting would be temperatures in the 50s with dew points in the 50s and high winds.The snowpack also has to be “ripe,” or at a temperature at or around freezing and saturated with water. Skiers refer to this type of snow, which has usually gone through several melting then freezing cycles, as “corn snow,” because the snow is wet and clumped in small pellets like kernels.When these air and snow conditions align, the moisture in the air turns into water and releases heat energy that then melts the snow, according to an email Simpson passed along from Senior Hydrologist Tim Buckelew of the Northeast River Forecast Center division of the National Weather Service. The wind helps increase the amount of heat transfer between the snow and the moisture, kind of like how wind from a fan cools your body in hot weather.(As a side note, rain itself does little to melt snow, as snow has little ability to absorb water and the difference in temperature between the snow and rain is not too great. Rain on a cold snowpack will turn to ice; rain on a ripe snowpack mostly flows right through, according to the weather service.)Unfortunately, we’re not near those optimal melting conditions.Monday, we had temperature in the low to mid teens with dew points well below zero. It’s windy, but that is just blowing the snow around and exposing it to the dry, cold air. Simpson said the snowpack is currently an average of 26 degrees Fahrenheit, but the cold air makes the snow on the surface much colder and more immune to the sun’s energy. Light, fluffy snow like we have received is also a good insulator as there are lots of air pockets among the flakes, so the interior of the snowpack will be warmer.So if Mother Nature isn’t cooperating, cities and towns have to find other ways to melt the snow.Primarily there are the common chemical ways.Salt lowers the melting point of snow, meaning that rather than melting at 32 degrees, snow will melt at a lower temperature.Cities and municipalities use salt to pretreat the roads to prevent the falling snow from sticking. But, when the temperatures fall into the teens, cities and municipalities spray the salt with other chemicals that further lowers the snow’s melting point.”In the industry, we call it magic salt – on a (cold) day, you put straight salt down, it’s not melting the snow, you’ve got to have it enhanced,” Michael Barbuzzi, of Barbuzzi Landscaping and Snow Removal Unlimited, said in an interview earlier this month.Chemicals added in commonly available products include Magnesium, Chlorine and Potassium.”We use a bi-product of the brewery industry – it actually smells like beer,” Barbuzzi noted.Then there are the mechanical melters – used in cities from New York to Moscow and recently borrowed by the City of Boston.”More and more municipalities are buying machines, they want that insurance coverage, trucking costs are going up, and there’s nowhere to put (the snow),” Terry Dwyer, North American sales manager for Trecan Snowmelters said Monday.Trecan is based in Nova Scotia and makes 10 models of portable snow melters that can melt from