Near the former RFK Stadium is one big, dirty snowball. How long will it take to melt it?
For three weeks, the District’s snow removal crews have been trucking most of the city’s excess snow and ice to one of the parking lots at the former RFK Stadium site.
By Friday, the 15-foot-tall snow and ice mound covered a 320,000 square-foot area, D.C. Department of Transportation spokesman German Vigil said. That’s the equivalent of five and a half football fields.
And it could be there well into May.
“To figure out how long will it actually take for some massive pile of snow or ice to melt, there’s only two numbers you need,” Jonathan Boreyko, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech, told WTOP. “One number is how much total heat is going into the snow from the sun or the warm air, and then the other number is how much mass of ice do you actually have to melt.”
Based on DDOT’s numbers, he estimated the RFK pile’s mass at a massive 33 million kilograms. The sun alone, he said, would melt a snow pile of that size and density in around 200 days, assuming no changes in air temperature.
“If the air can get dramatically above freezing, it’s a much more complex analysis,” Boreyko said.
But the warming air should help get the job done in “tens of days, not hundreds,” he said.
The high end of that estimate would leave remnants of the pile at RFK until Memorial Day weekend.
Boreyko has published two papers on melting snow and ice, but he spends more time on other research.
“Something my group is doing that I’m very excited about, for these winter seasons, is we’re trying to use electric fields to rip ice and frost off of surfaces like cars and airplanes electrically,” Boreyko said.
They call it electrostatic de-icing: “It’s something we’re trying to make more effective, and we’re excited about its prospects long term,” he said.