The microscopic^1 thermodynamics of snow

Listening to Michi Lehning talk, my curiosity was raised by a couple of passages. One of these was the use of mean field theories for describing the snow metamorphism.  Therefore I asked him for a little of literature on the subject. Here below his suggested readings:

I.M. Lifshitz and V.V. Slyozov. The kinetics of precipitation from supersaturated solid solutions. 

J. Phys. Chem. Solids, 19(1-2):35–50, 1961. 

[C. Wagner. Theorie der Alterung von Niederschlagen durch umlÅNosen (Ostwald-Reifung). Z. 

Elektrochem., 65(7-8):581–591, 1961. 

Probably easier in language and style: 

C.W.J. Beenakker and J. Ross. Theory of Ostwald ripening for open systems. J. Chem. Phys., 

83:4710–4714, 1985. 

L. Ratke and C. Beckermann. Concurrent growth and coarsening of spheres. Acta mater, 

49:4041–4054, 2001. 

S.P. Marsh and M.E. Glicksman. Kinetics of phase coarsening in dense systems. Acta Materialia, 

44(9):3761–3771, 1996. 

and with respect to snow: 

L. Legagneux and F. Domine. A mean field model of the decrease of the specific surface area of dry snow during isothermal metamorphism. J. Geophys. Res. Earth, 110(F4), NOV 18 2005.

Looking at the citations chain one can more or less recover most of the literature on the subject. You can also give a look to this more recent post.

^1 microscopic thermodynamics is, obviously, a sort of oxymoron. However, these thermodynamics work at a scale which is much smaller than what we want usually to treat (at field or catchment scale).