Snowy Simulations

What do the avalanches in Disney’s “Frozen” and reallife avalanches have in common? They both can be modeled with the computer graphics that Chenfanfu Jiang of the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science helped create for the entertainment industry.

His simulations of snow, sand and water now are leveraged to capture and predict the complexity of a slab of snow’s behavior as cracks propagate through it.

Snow-slab avalanches are particularly dangerous to hikers and skiers, and having the tools of computer graphics applied to real situations could potentially save lives.