Computer-Aided Design of Passive Snow Control Measures

Control of blowing and drifting snow on the nation's highways is important to reducing maintenance costs and closure times and to improving crash incidence by improving visibility, preventing drifting on the road, and reducing road icing. Means of engineered mitigation using road design and snow fences have been incorporated into a software tool, SnowMan (for Snow Management), that has been deployed for use statewide within the New York State Department of Transportation. The software has been developed as a MicroStation Development Language application to run within the Bentley MicroStation CAD software environment used in highway design projects. The scope of SnowMan includes drift prediction (mitigated and unmitigated), evaluation of roadway cross sections and determination of trial fence solutions subject to combinations of height, setback, porosity constraints, and prescription of upwind earthwork solutions. This paper describes the development and implementation of this software tool for mitigation of blowing and drifting snow problems and illustrates its usage, while also providing an overview of the relevant data, underlying algorithms, and engineering approaches to blowing and drifting snow mitigation as implemented in SnowMan.