While the National Building Code of Canada (NBCC) provides engineers with suitable snow loading guidelines for structural design, the strict application of the code may not lead to an optimized structural design. Generalizations have been made to ensure the applicability of the code to the majority of potential structures within Canada, which result in conservative estimates in certain situations. In particular, the interaction between region-specific prevailing wind directionality, climate and roof orientation are not accounted for. However, the development of advanced physical and numerical snow simulation approaches allows for the investigation of building-specific variables that affect snow loading. The Finite Area Element (FAE) process simulates the hour-by-hour accumulation and depletion of snow on a specific building design. This tool provides detailed quantification of the probabilistic snow loading accounting for region-specific long term meteorological conditions and building-specific variables such as roof size, exposure to prevailing winds, thermal capacity and local aerodynamics. While providing a detailed assessment of the snow loads, a full FAE assessment can be both time consuming and relatively costly for many applications. This parametric analysis approach has been developed using a variety of simple building geometries to provide an approach to assess the relative impacts of many of the key variables needed to inform a design. This paper describes the physical and numerical models used for the parametric simulation of snow loads, and discusses their application to structures within Canada.
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