Yea, powdery snow isn't all that hard to simulate (relatively) I believe. The snowflakes are just particles that are acted upon by an outside force( wind usually). I live and grew up in New England, and the snow in Frozen looks completely realistic.

It's amazing the amount of work put into these movies. Most moviegoers won't realize what it took to simulate snow realistically, but the would have noticed if it was wrong.

Yeah, the paper talks about how to vary the parameters to simulate powder, wet snow, slush, etc. These techniques were developed for the movie Frozen, and to my eye (I grew up with snow too) they did a great job of simulating all manner of snow and ice.