Publications de Francesco Comola

Evidence of Strong Flux Underestimation by Bulk Parametrizations During Drifting and Blowing Snow

Michael Lehning, Wolf Hendrik Huwald, Varun Sharma, Francesco Comola, Koichi Nishimura, Jérôme François Sylvain Dujardin, Daniela Brito Melo, Armin Sigmund

The influence of drifting and blowing snow on surface mass and energy exchange is difficult to quantify due to limitations in both measurements and models, but is still potentially very important over large areas with seasonal or perennial snow cover. We p ...

SPRINGER2023

Modeling Snow Saltation: The Effect of Grain Size and Interparticle Cohesion

Michael Lehning, Varun Sharma, Francesco Comola, Daniela Brito Melo, Armin Sigmund

The surface of the Earth is snow-covered at least seasonally over large areas. This snow surface is highly dynamic, particularly under the influence of strong winds. The motion of snow particles driven by the wind not only changes the snow cover but has im ...

2022

Evidence of Strong Flux Underestimation by Bulk Parametrizations During Drifting and Blowing Snow

Michael Lehning, Wolf Hendrik Huwald, Varun Sharma, Francesco Comola, Koichi Nishimura, Jérôme François Sylvain Dujardin, Daniela Brito Melo, Armin Sigmund

The influence of drifting and blowing snow on surface mass and energy exchange is difficult to quantify due to limitations in both measurements and models, but is still potentially very important over large areas with seasonal or perennial snow cover. We p ...

2022

Meteorology and snow transport at S17 near Syowa, Antarctica, in austral summer 2018/2019

Michael Lehning, Wolf Hendrik Huwald, Varun Sharma, Francesco Comola, Jérôme François Sylvain Dujardin, Daniela Brito Melo, Armin Sigmund

This dataset contains measurement and simulation data. The measurements characterize the standard meteorology, turbulence, and snow transport at the S17 site near Syowa Station in East Antarctica during an expedition in austral summer 2018/2019. Large-eddy ...

2021

Modeling snow saltation: the effect of grain size and interparticle cohesion

Michael Lehning, Varun Sharma, Francesco Comola, Daniela Brito Melo, Armin Sigmund

This dataset includes the parallel application and the main results supporting the research article "Modeling snow saltation: the effect of grain size and interparticle cohesion" published at the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.The code is a f ...

2021

Cohesion-Induced Enhancement of Aeolian Saltation

Michael Lehning, Francesco Comola, Johan Alexandre Philippe Gaume

The wind-driven saltation of granular material plays a key role in various geophysical processes on Earth, Mars, Venus, and Titan. Although interparticle cohesion is known to limit the number of grains lifted from the surface through aerodynamic entrainmen ...

AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION2019

Preferential Deposition of Snow and Dust Over Hills: Governing Processes and Relevant Scales

Marc Parlange, Michael Lehning, Marco Giovanni Giometto, Francesco Comola

Preferential deposition of snow and dust over complex terrain is responsible for a wide range of environmental processes and accounts for a significant source of uncertainty in the surface mass balances of cold and arid regions. Despite the growing body of ...

2019

On the suitability of the Thorpe-Mason model for calculating sublimation of saltating snow

Michael Lehning, Varun Sharma, Francesco Comola

The Thorpe and Mason (TM) model for calculating the mass lost from a sublimating snow grain is the basis of all existing small-and large-scale estimates of drifting snow sublimation and the associated snow mass balance of polar and alpine regions. We revis ...

COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH2018

Hydrological response of two high altitude Swiss catchments to energy balance and temperature index melt schemes

Michael Lehning, Alice Marie Burri, Francesco Comola, Abdul Shakoor, Mathias Thierry Pierre Bavay

2018

Is the Thorpe and Mason model valid for drifting and blowing snow?

Michael Lehning, Varun Sharma, Francesco Comola

Sublimation of drifting and blowing snow has been recognized as an important component of the surface mass budget of polar and alpine regions. The Thorpe and Mason (TM) model is the basis of all existing small and largescale estimates of drifting snow sub ...

Copernicus2018

Fragmentation of wind-blown snow crystals

Michael Lehning, Enrico Paterna, Francesco Comola, Johan Alexandre Philippe Gaume

Understanding the dynamics driving the transformation of snowfall crystals into blowing snow particles is critical to correctly account for the energy and mass balances in polar and alpine regions. Here we propose a fragmentation theory of fractal snow cry ...

2017

Energy- and momentum-conserving model of splash entrainment in sand and snow saltation

Michael Lehning, Francesco Comola

Despite being the main sediment entrainment mechanism in aeolian transport, granular splash is still poorly understood. We provide a deeper insight into the dynamics of sand and snow ejection with a stochastic model derived from the energy and momentum con ...

American Geophysical Union2017

Simulating the influence of snow surface processes on soil moisture dynamics and streamflow generation in an alpine catchment

Michael Lehning, Nander Wever, Francesco Comola, Mathias Thierry Pierre Bavay

The assessment of flood risks in alpine, snow-covered catchments requires an understanding of the linkage between the snow cover, soil and discharge in the stream network. Here, we apply the comprehensive, distributed model Alpine3D to investigate the role ...

Copernicus GmbH2017

Stochastic modeling of snow transport and hydrologic response in alpine terrain

Francesco Comola

The scientific community has developed a keen interest in the processes driving the hydrologic cycle in alpine regions. The concern mainly stems from the vulnerability of snow-covered environments to the warming temperatures, such that entire ecological an ...

EPFL2017

StreamFlow 1.0: an extension to the spatially distributed snow model Alpine3D for hydrological modelling and deterministic stream temperature prediction

Tristan Jonas Brauchli, Michael Lehning, Wolf Hendrik Huwald, Aurélien Gallice, Francesco Comola, Mathias Thierry Pierre Bavay

Climate change is expected to strongly impact the hydrological and thermal regimes of Alpine rivers within the coming decades. In this context, the development of hydrological models accounting for the specific dynamics of Alpine catchments appears as one ...

Copernicus Gesellschaft Mbh2016

Efficient global optimization of reservoir geomechanical parameters based on synthetic aperture radar-derived ground displacements

Francesco Comola

When large volumes of fluids are removed from or injected into underground formations for, e.g., hydrocarbon and water production, CO_2 storage, gas storage, and geothermal energy exploitation, monitoring of surface deformations coupled to numerical modeli ...

Soc Exploration Geophysicists2016

Scale-dependent effects of solar radiation patterns on the snow-dominated hydrologic response

Bettina Schaefli, Michael Lehning, Andrea Rinaldo, Francesco Comola, Gianluca Botter, Pierfrancesco Da Ronco, Mathias Thierry Pierre Bavay

Solar radiation is a dominant driver of snowmelt dynamics and streamflow generation in alpine catchments. A better understanding of how solar radiation patterns affect the hydrologic response is needed to assess when calibrated temperature-index models are ...

American Geophysical Union2015

Thermodynamics in the hydrologic response: Travel time formulation and application to Alpine catchments

Bettina Schaefli, Michael Lehning, Andrea Rinaldo, Francesco Comola

This paper presents a spatially-explicit model for hydro-thermal response simulations of Alpine catchments, accounting for advective and non-advective energy fluxes in stream networks characterized by arbitrary degrees of geomorphological complexity. The r ...

American Geophysical Union2015

Damage pattern and damage progression on breakwater roundheads under multidirectional waves

Francesco Comola, Lorenzo Martinelli

An experimental model test study is carried out to investigate damage pattern and progression on a rock armoured breakwater roundhead subjected to multidirectional waves. Concerning damage pattern, the most critical sector is observed to shift leeward with ...

Elsevier2014