Our lab is interested in the snow microbiome and as I'm developing the questions that will form my thesis I am interested to know of any literature or ongoing research that discusses the use of snow as a media for culturing microorganisms. My interest is to replicate the top layer of melting snow in terms of snow grain size, compaction, water flow/evaporation and other relevant features in order to study community development in vitro.
So far I have found some work describing methods for marine snow by A.L. Shanks and E.W. Edmondson (1989), whereas I am more interested in high altitude snow-pack near glacial sites containing blooms of snow algae.
Nikrad et al. (2016; doi: 10.1093/femsec/fiw081) is a review of papers on subzero microbiomes. Table 1 lists papers in which people have cultured various micro-organisms, some at low and freezing temperatures. Maybe one of them will have a suitable protocol. Good luck!