passive solar driveway snow-melt accelerator

I've been watching the way sunlight clears snow and ice from driveways and sidewalks, and I think I've learned something useful.

First, some things that are obvious:

After a small area of the driveway snow melts down to pavement, the heat from the sun on the cleared pavement will, of course, help to melt the rest. The sunlight that falls on snow-covered pavement, on the other hand, will mostly be reflected, and will be much less effective at melting snow. So, ideally, one would not want the driveway to melt uniformly; it would be better for some fraction to melt all the way down to pavement, so it can begin right away to absorb solar energy. This would increase the total heat input, and thus melt the whole driveway as rapidly as possible.

That is what happens, in fact, but it doesn't work nearly as well as it should. Instead, cleared areas increase much more slowly than the available energy should accomplish; ice at the edges melts to water, and that water evaporates into dry winter air, taking a *huge* amount of heat energy with it. Meanwhile, the nearby dry pavement gets much warmer than is needed to melt snow, but this energy is mostly wasted. Most of the dry pavement just heats the air; its warmth doesn't melt anything, because asphalt has lousy thermal conductivity.

But increasing the thermal conductivity would not help if most of the driveway were snow covered. In that case, increasing the thermal conductivity would actually be a bad idea, because the large snow covered area would then keep the whole driveway cold enough that ice wouldn't even melt, let alone vaporize.

The crux of the problem, I think, is in getting that melt water out of the picture, so it doesn't suck up energy that could have melted more snow. Draining would help, but my driveway is too flat for this to happen, so snow just sits there and waits for melt water to evaporate.

So (finally) here's my idea:

What I'd like to have is a surface that wicks moisture from melted ice over the entire area of cleared pavement, so the whole area can contribute energy to warm and vaporize it.

I could cover the driveway with canvas, or something, and I think that would help. But my wife would have a cow, and the neighbors would make jokes about curb-to-curb carpeting. Maybe very thin grooves would work, but I'm reluctant to damage my driveway surface, because I'd probably get pot holes. So I'm thinking about using that seal-coating stuff, and putting grooves in that (next summer, of course. Ya can't seal coat in Chicago in February.)