Physical improvements to a mesoscopic cellular automaton model for three-dimensional snow crystal growth

TL;DR

This paper develops an improved three-dimensional cellular automaton model for snow crystal growth, incorporating stronger physical rules to better replicate observed snow crystal morphologies and systematically explores the effects of parameter variations.

Contribution

The paper introduces a physically improved 3D cellular automaton model for snow crystal growth, addressing weaknesses in previous models and systematically analyzing resulting morphologies.

Findings

Model reproduces key snow crystal features observed in photographs.

Morphologies vary systematically with model parameters.

Enhanced physical connections improve model realism.

Abstract

We motivate and derive the dynamical rules for a computationally feasible three-dimensional cellular automaton model of snow crystal growth. The model improves upon points of weak physical connections identified in other similar models which have produced morphological features observed in many snow crystal photographs. A systematic survey of the morphologies resulting from our model illustrates the degree to which these features persist in our results, and the trends that appear as model parameters are varied.