Аннотация:Material properties of snow are determined by snow microstructure. However, differently to the most of other natural materials, whether granular or fibrous, pure or mixtures, the microstructure of snow is changing with time. This change is commonly associated with sintering and/or recrystallization. In addition, snow is not either granular or fibrous, and the processes involved in the microstructure evolution is not either sintering of recrystallization. That is why modeling of snow metamorphism is turning into attempts to combine very different physical relationships coming from different fields of material science and in many cases never before considered as compatible ones.
On the other hand, analysis of existent "a microstucture"–"a property" dependencies proposed for not pure solid materials shows that at one or another stage of developing of such a dependence an intuitive physical logic based on empirically determined behavior is always used. This is especially true for the effective heat conductivity of granular, fibrous or disperse materials.
Modern techniques provide more or less accurate quantitative descriptions of (snow) microstructure. The relation of this data to material properties is not straight-forward. A logical construction combining several previously developed approaches to describe the physical properties dependence on microstructure is proposed for snow and tested with experimentally determined effective heat conductivity of snow.