It was a great ski season here in northern Utah, but the situation at low elevations in the Alps this year was dismal. The photo below was taken on March 3rd at Brixen im Thale, part of the SkiWelt Wilderkaiser – Brixental megaresort in the eastern Tyrol of Austria. Despite it being early March, the natural snowpack was non-existent and artificial snow was scant.
This is a low elevation area. The photo is taken at 800 meters and much of the skiing in this region is is below 2000 meters. At these elevations, snow is especially vulnerable to temperature, and this winter was remarkably warm in the Austrian Alps. Geosphere Austria, the state meteorological and geophysical science service, reported that February was the warmest on record, with a mean temperature in mountainous areas an incredible 5.9°C (10.6°F) above the 1961–1990 average. The impacts can be seen above. This was followed by a March that rated as the warmest in history in the Austrian lowlands and the ninth warmest in the mountains. Basically, this winter was a disaster for lower-elevation skiing.
On the other hand, March snow depths at upper elevations of the western Austria states of Vorarlberg and Tyrol were 10 to 20 percent above average, whereas in the central Austrian States they were near average. Basically, it was a tale of two altitudes. That said, does this represent the future of skiing in the Austrian Alps? Let's take a look.
Recent Trends
Austria has an extensive snowpack observing system. For the 2nd edition of Secrets of the Greatest Snow on Earth, Marc Olefs of Geosphere provided me with long-term trends of seasonal mean snow depth (top figure below) and snow cover duration (bottom figure below) in Austria from 1961–2021. No observing sites in Austria show positive trends in either of these variables. Roughly 67% exhibit statistically significant declines in average snow depth and 80% show statistically significant declines in snow-cover duration (i.e., the length of time with at least 1 cm of snow on the ground). These trends tend to be largest at lower elevations.
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| Source: Steenburgh (2023). Data from Olefs et al. 2021 and updated through 2021. |
Note that with one exception, these sites are below 2000 meters. In western Austria, there are resorts that go to well above that elevation, including a few places where lifts extend to more than 3000 meters, such as Stubai Glacier, Hintertux Glacier, and Sölden. These resorts have upper-elevation glacier skiing and typically long seasons. Hintertux Glacier is currently the only ski area in the world with year-round operations (Zermatt attempts to do this, but has not been able to the past two years due to poor glacier conditions).
It is well documented that glaciers in the Alps are loosing remarkable amounts of mass. One of the most studied glaciers in the world is the Hintereisferner in the Ötztal Alps about 15 to 20 km from Sölden as the crow flies. The annual mass balance of the Hintereisferner has been negative every year since 1983 and losses have been accelerating.
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| Source: https://wgms.ch/products_ref_glaciers/hintereisferner-alps/ |
There are no "good" years for glaciers in the Alps anymore. Oh, you might hear that they had a good winter (this winter might have been a decent one at upper elevations), but the insidious influence of temperature is simply too overwhelming. Hintertux Glacier goes to extreme lengths to enable summer skiing operations, which I suspect are not going to continue much longer.
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| Source: Steenburgh (2023), from 80-20/Shuterstock.com |
Future Snowfall Trends
I often tell people that global warming is not an equal opportunity offender. The snow climate of the Alps will suffer at all elevations, but the percentage declines in snowfall and snowpack will be largest at low elevations and smallest at upper elevations. Let's have a look at some projections.
In 2018, Prisco Frei and coauthors from ETH Zurich and MeteoSwiss used regional climate modeling to estimate trends in September to May snowfall across the Alps relative to 1981–2010. Their paper (
Frei et al. 2018) is one of the best deep dives into future snowpack trends in the Alps, but very useful for understanding what may happen in other regions. They used multiple simulations from regional climate models to do this.
For brevity, I will show one figure showing estimated trends in mean September to May snowfall from 1981–2010 to 2070–2099 under a moderate emissions scenario (known as RCP4.5) in which climate models produce an average warming of global mean temperatures of about 2˚C during the 21st century [Ed: this was corrected from 20th century in the original version of this post] and a high emissions scenario (RCP8.5) that produces almost 4˚C of warming (warming in the Alps would be greater that the global average temperature increase). The slide below summarizes the estimated trends with the medians in each elevation band indicated by triangles and the range produced by the models by the color-filled area. For both scenarios, declines are largest at lower elevations and decrease with elevation. For the 1000–1250 m elevation band, the snowfall declines are 15–40% under the moderate emissions scenario, but at 2250–2500 m, they are 1–18%.
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Source: Frei et al. (2018)
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The primary cause of these declines is a greater fraction of precipitation falling as rain instead of snow. Note that the declines increase with higher emissions and greater warming. The decisions we make today and in the immediate future do matter and do make a difference.
Impacts on Skiing
How will this affect skiing and ski area operations? This is a critical question for Austria because winter tourism generates about 6% of their GDP through direct and indirect effects. Despite having a population of under 9 million people, Austria is 2nd in the world (to the United States) with over 40 million skier days per year at ski resorts. Roughly 66% of these skiers are foreign tourists. For comparison, Utah had a record breaking 7.1 million skier days last year.
In 2011, Robert Steiger and Bruno Abegg of the University of Innsbruck examined the natural snow reliability of 228 Austrian ski areas. They defined snow reliable as having at least 100 days with at least 30 cm of natural snow in 7 out of 10 winters at the midpoint of the ski area. This is a simplistic approach, but we will use it here to illustrate some regional and topographic differences in ski resort vulnerability. They also used some simple modeling to assess reliability with snowmaking.
Results for the 228 Austrian Ski Areas are presented below. I have added some annotations. Their baseline period was 1961–1990. During that period 97% of Austrian ski areas were snow reliable with snowmaking. 80% were snow reliable with natural snow. As temperatures increase above what was observed during that 30 year period, the number of snow reliable ski areas declines. For 2°C of warming, only 40% of Austrian Ski Areas are naturally snow reliable and only 64% are reliable with snowmaking.
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| Source: Steiger and Abegg (2011) |
They also broke these estimates down by region. The figure below shows versions of the graph above for each Austrian State with the baseline being the left-most bar and 4°C of warming being the right-most bar. I've used an arrow to indicate the 2°C of warming estimate.
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| Source: Steiger and Abegg |
In Lower Austria, where most resorts are at lower elevations, no ski resorts are naturally snow reliable with 2°C of warming and only 1 is snow reliable with snowmaking. That contrasts with all 13 being naturally snow reliable from 1961–1990. In contrast, higher-elevation regions with higher elevation ski areas are more resilient to warming. This is especially evident in Tyrol and Salzburg where a greater fraction of resorts are naturally snow reliable or reliable with snowmaking than in Lower Austria, Upper Austria, and Styria where resorts are lower.
This doesn't mean that resorts in Tyrol and Salzburg are unaffected by warming. We began this long post with a photo of Brixen im Thale in eastern Tyrol showing a disastrous situation for skiing. Resorts with high-elevation terrain but large vertical drops will see more rapid declines in snow reliability at low elevations than at upper elevations. For instance, a resort like Sölden, which has more than 6000 feet of lift-served vertical, may be more snow reliable at upper elevations, but find low elevations increasingly unreliable. The photos below were taken on the same day in March.
Many villages in the Alps are in deeply incised valleys and at low elevations. Snowmaking is already essential, but will become increasingly so in the future. At some resorts, new lifts may be needed to increase the capacity for up and downloading to and from areas that are more snow sure.
We are now in the early stages of what Brian Fagan called The Great Warming. The snow climate of the 20th century is gone forever. Some regions are more vulnerable to the initial wave of global warming than others and lower elevations of the Austrian Alps is one of those regions. There are other great snow climates that are also highly vulnerable, including low-elevations of Japan's heavy snow region near the Sea of Japan where historically most of the snow fell at temperatures near or even a bit above 0°C. A small amount of warming in those areas is the difference between rain and snow.
Skiing in some low-elevation regions of the Austrian Alps may already be doomed. That said, there is still time to save skiing in upper-elevations of the Austrian Alps. If we were to contain global warming, skiing will survive in those areas, albeit with some major changes, such as a major decline in lift-served ski terrain with glaciers, more rain-on-snow events, and a shorter snow-cover duration season.
What is going on in that ski glacier pic? Are those piles of manmade that the cats are spreading for summer use? Some ugly snow.
ReplyDeleteThose are "geotextiles," basically tarps that insulate the snow and reflect sunlight to preserve snow. Preserve snow in one area, then uncover and push it in when you need it.
DeleteDust on snow is an issue in Europe. There have been some fairly severe Saharan dust events in the Alps. I am not sure if that is why the snow is so dirty in that phto, but it is a possibility.
that is seriously wild! covers for the massive piles, wow.
DeleteAre you of the opinion humans can change the temperature of the planet? Should we?
ReplyDeleteIt's not my opinion. It's my conclusion based on multiple lines of evidence and an overwhelming amount of data and analysis. Warming in recent decades is due to human activity. We are changing the climate and warming the world. This is no longer debated amongst credible scientists.
DeleteShould we? That's not really the question. The question is, should we continue to do things that will warm the planet further, melt land ice, melt ice sheets, increase extreme precipitation, exacerbate drought, etc. Human society emerged during the relatively stable climate of the last 10,000 years. Most of our infrastructure was built in the last 1,000 years and especially the last 100 years. Departures from this relatively stable climate are going to be challenging.
What explains warmer periods which humans did not contribute to?
DeleteIt depends on what warm periods you are referring too.
DeleteMilankovitch cycles, related to the Earth's orbit and axis of rotation cause long-term variations between ice ages and warmer interglacial periods. These are described at https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/earth-science/milankovitch-orbital-cycles-and-their-role-in-earths-climate/. These are the forcing mechanisms, with feedbacks related to the production or drawdown of greenhouse gases and other natural feedback loops also contributing.
Smaller variations in climate, such as the medieval warm period, were produced b an increase in the suns output and a decrease in volcanic activity. Ocean circulation patterns may have further amplified this in the north Atlantic region. The warming in that period was, however, much smaller than what is seen as one moves from an ice age to a warmer interglacial period (and much briefer). It is also much smaller than the warming in the last few decades.
But the consensus just a few decades ago was that we were moving towards the next ice age… what changed? I would also argue that there are many credible scientists who believe that man-made climate change is not the cause of any current deviation of historical norms. Definitely not to the extent that’s being pushed by mainstream, academia, media government, etc. I appreciate your insight and expertise.
DeleteThere was never a consensus that we were moving toward a new ice age. That is a myth. Here is a peer-reviewed article debunking this myth: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bams2370_1.xml.
DeleteThe 1970s were a long time ago, but there was an emerging concern and consensus about global warming even then.
You can find scientists that dispute just about anything. What I said is that there is no longer any *debate* amongst credible scientists. That is an accurate statement. There is debate, for example, about things like how large the CO2 climate forcing is, to what degree pollution and the sunlight reflected back to space is countering that forcing, etc. However, there is no credible debate in the science community that humans are altering the climate system and responsible for most of the recent warming.
I'll add that we have looked into every other known possibility, including crazy ideas like climate change being caused by cosmic rays. None of these ideas have ever withstood any careful analysis.
A good theory to explain climate change requires more than explaining the increase in the Earth's average temperature. It requires explaining why the arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet, why the troposphere is warming but the stratosphere cooling, etc. This is called climate fingerprinting and it is just one example of the types of analyses that scientists have done to support the overwhelming consensus that exists today. If you want to learn more about this, there's a techy talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0scjpK3u0Vw
We know why the Earth is warming.
Who are these "credible scientists" you mention? Do you have any names with similar credentials to Jim's that dispute that man has caused climate change?
DeleteJohn Clauser, William Happer, Ivar Gievar, Kiminori Itoh, Judith Curry, Freeman Dyson, Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer…I could go on, there are 1000’s of highly qualified people. A big problem I have is when a scientist says the “science is settled.” The vary nature of science is the constant evolution of knowledge. But now there is a push from influential people who own beachfront property, fly around in private jets making ridiculous amounts of money from climate alarmism telling the rest of us we need to cut back and there is no room for debate. Covid-19 showed us science is always evolving, and the consensus is not always correct. EVs are a perfect example. The production of these vehicles damages the environment immensely , the countries which produce the batteries use child/slave labor and driving them pollutes the air we breathe far more than the modern internal combustion engine. The question is not is the climate changing of course it is it always has and always will. The question is whether it’s appropriate to damage first world economies and lower the standards of living, while also preventing 3rd world nations from rising to success by restricting them from using fossil fuel technology in favor of wind mills and solar panels.
DeleteAh, my good commenting fellow. Your raised doubts, "big problem", and other concerns will continue to wilt in the literal heat of all the mounting evidence. They are not new or convincing. But by all means, try them as other skeptics and deniers do since they have no better arguments to raise. Please recognize it as a sign of the weakness of their position. It's why they have gradually moved their stance and the argument over time- because they've been forced to do so in the face of tried and true evidence. First it was "no such thing", then "unlikely", to "probably naturally caused"; the next stops of "nothing we can do about it" and "too expensive" are my personal predictions. It's been a great job stalling out meaningful changes, whether intentional or not, but meanwhile we all melt/burn.
ReplyDeleteI perceive you don't like being forced into policy change, or feel you have no control, and may be suspicious of big parties with power acting against your best interests. Consider that it is businesses and special interest groups who do far more lobbying and have more to lose/gain than climate scientists! Basically all the cumulative body of scientific evidence together disproves the excuses that climate change is not man-made. They have the receipts, man. No room for disagreement you say? Again, evidence has tried those other theories which have been found wanting. Nothing else explains our predicament, and surely that's what it is, a real tough situation urgently needing a solution.
Best of luck on your journey to the truth as I did some years ago. Due to our situation becoming more dire, not only the PhDs see it but now also more and more of us regular earthlings everywhere. Wavy jet streams, stronger storms, bigger heatwaves and fires, and clear day floods are evidence people relate to, and the light bulb is starting to go off. Property Insurance companies aren't getting out of certain US markets because the risk is predictable, controllable, or even gradually increasing. Quite the opposite.
I work in Real Estate and when the big data folks and Wall Street investors are getting on board with climate change risk weighting for portfolios you know the tide has shifted for real (rising, in this case, due to climate change).