???Snow makes roads dangerous for drivers and commuters, causing many accidents each year due to skidding on snow and black ice. In addition, snow that blows across roadways has troubled road maintenance crews and additional maintenance resources are required to deal with this problem.
???Stuart S. Chen a professor in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering has helped to develop a user-friendly desktop software package, aptly called "Snow Man," which helps highway designers and road maintenance personnel by providing them with cost-effective solutions to the snow drift problem.
???Chen has many contributions to the field with the development of this software, which could provide much-needed assistance during the winter months.
???"New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) funded the development of this work," Chen said. "This work was initially called a CADD-Based Expert System for Passive Control of Blowing and Drifting Snow. In the process of doing the software development work we decided to call the software product Snow Man."
??? There are two ways that the software works, which are applicable either to new roadway design or to existing snowdrift-susceptible sites.
???"The first way involves the evaluation or design of snow fences like the orange mesh fences one sees at the blue water tower highway interchange or the wooden fences one sees along the Route 219," Chen said.
???The second way Snow Man works involves evaluating the design of the roadway itself, according to Chen.
???"Sometimes sufficient amounts of blowing snow can be caught in a lower area of land upwind of the road, like a detention pond catches water, without needing to erect a snow fence," Chen said. "Each way, the user inputs climate data [amount of snowfall during the winter season, prevailing wind direction] and topographic data [from land surveys]."
???There are different areas where Snow Man can be applied.
???"One place where Snow Man is being applied is wherever blowing and drifting snow is a problem already," Chen said.
???The Snow Man software is also being used to make sure there are not potential problems with road production plans.
???"We'd like to preemptively prevent such problems even before a road widening or contemplated new road construction is even built by considering snow drifting susceptibility virtually at the design stage," Chen said.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
