Wasatch Weather Weenies

Our time in Innsbruck is winding down and we are taking a couple of short trips in the Alps before returning to Utah.  We are currently in the Hohe Tauern National Park, an area of Austria I've never visited before.  We arrived today and spent some time visiting the very touristy but also very beautiful Krimml Waterfalls.  There was a information exhibit at the base of the waterfalls (collectively they drop over 1200 vertical feet) that examined water in all it's forms, including ice and glaciers.  At it, I learned of some remarkable modeling work by Julien Seguinot and coauthors simulating the glacial history of the Alps over the last 120,000 years.  The video is simply mind boggling.   It's difficult to comprehend a past in which the Alps were essentially entirely ice covered and glaciers were extending into the Alpine Foreland to the north and south of this remarkable mountain chain.  Below is a the simulated reconstruction for about 30,000 yea...

Lift-served glacier skiing in Germany will come to an end this year when the Schneefernerkopf lift on the Zugspitze, Germany's highest peak and on the border with Austria, is dismantled. Source: t-online .  Glaciers across the Alps are shrinking and those on the Zugspitze are in rapid decline. The Shcneefernerkopf lift was on the Northern Schneeferner glacier (ferner is a word used for glacier in western Austria and southern Germany).  I took the photo below of the T-bar and glacier in August 2015 and even then it was suffering with essentially no seasonal snow coverage. More information concerning the Northern Schneeferner and the rapidly declining remants of Germany's other three glaciers is available at  https://zugspitze.de/glacier . 

I'm not sure how I missed this, but Austria's Hintertuxer Glacier Ski Resort, famous for being open 365 days a year, temporarily suspended ski operations in August. J2Ski first reported this on August 4.  Although I could not confirm the date of suspension, the resort web site still indicated on September 1 that there are no ski operations. Screenshot of Hintertux Glacier Web Site, 2:46 PM MDT 1 September 2025 There are some reports that this is the first time they have suspended skiing in August, and ChatGPT told me that's the case.  On the other hand, I can find some social media posts that suggest they suspended operations last August.  It's hard to uncover the truth in the modern internet.  Regardless, these are sad times, with declining viability of summer glacier skiing in the Alps.   The good news is that it's turned colder in Austria and I even noticed some suggestions of a bit of snow on the web cams.  

In March, Whistler Blackcomb announced that they would be cancelling summer ski camps indefinitely.  Yesterday, Powder Magazine reported that this was due to declining summer conditions on the Horstman Glacier. Source:  https://www.powder.com/news/whistler-blackcomb-summer-skiing-cancelled Summer skiing is in decline worldwide.  I investigated this for my book, Secrets of the Greatest Snow on Earth.  In 1985 there were 32 operating glacier-skiing resorts in the Alps.  Today there are only a few that operate for a significant part of the summer (Passo Stelvio, Saas Fe, Kitzsteinhorn, Mölltal, Les 2 Alpes, Ignes, Val d'Isere, Cervina, Hintertux, Zermatt).   Hintertux in Austria is the only ski area in the world still operating year round.  Zermatt used to, but gave up the past two years (maybe they will survive this year).  Hintertux moves Heaven and Earth to keep their skiing going through the summer.   Source: Steenburgh (2023)...

In the previous post, Climate Change Case Study: Austria , we examined recent trends in snow measures and potential impacts of future warming on skiing in the eastern Alps.  Declines in snow and snowcover are evident in the recent past and expected to continue in the next few decades in low- and mid-elevation areas.  High-elevation resorts in Tyrol, where resorts more commonly extend above 2000 meters, are the most "climate resilient" but will still feel the effects of climate change.  Ski area viability declines with ongoing greenhouse gas emissions and future warming.  One estimate suggest that with 2°C of warming relative to 1961–1990, only 64% of Austrian ski areas will be snow reliable.  With 4°C of warming, this number drops to 16%.   In this post we look at the fate of glaciers in the Alps.  Glaciers are large masses of land-based, perennial ice, and they exist at upper-elevations throughout the Alps.  The map below shows the Alpine gl...

Anyone who has lived in Seattle, as I had the good fortune to do from 1989 to 1995, knows it as "The Mountain."  On clear days, the snow-and-ice-covered mass that is Mt. Rainier looms over the city and serves as a beacon for mountain adventures.  I spent a great deal of time hiking on its lower flanks and even summited once.  Amongst many gems in the National Park System, Mt. Rainier National Park is one of the best.   But as discussed in a New York Times article published earlier this week , the glaciers of Mt. Rainier are suffering (that link is not paywalled, but I'm not sure if there is a limit on how many people will be able to use it).  The article is based on a recently released National Park Service report available at at  https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/DownloadFile/687937 .    As detailed in that report, glacier area on Mount Rainier declined 44% from 1896 to 2021, a net loss of just over 55 square kilometers of glacier area.  S...

It's been an awful year for glaciers and summer skiing in the European Alps.  In 1985 there were 32 operating glacier skiing resorts in the European Alps. Not all of these operated year round, but most provided skiing for part of the warm season.  Only a handful remain today.  Two, Hintertux in Austria and Zermatt in Switzerland, have historically operated 365 days a year on upper-elevation glaciers.  Glacier areas in Saas Fe (Switzerland) and Passo Stelvio (Italy) are open in the summer but closed for other parts of the year.  Other resorts that operate for parts of the summer include Kitzsteinhorn (Austria), Mölltal (Austria), Les 2 Alpes (France), Tignes (France), and Cervinia (Italy).  Racing camps are probably a big part of their business.   This year, however, Zermatt suspended operations on July 29.  As announced by Zermatt Bergbahnen, " The mild winter of 2021/2022, which saw little snowfall, leaving only a thin covering of snow in Ze...

The Pizol Glacier in the Glarus Alps of northeastern Switzerland is one of 500 small Swiss glaciers that have disappeared since 1900.  Photo: Matthias Huss/Swiss Academy of Sciences It was an exceptionally good snow year in the northern Alps this year, and May was quite cool.  I was wondering if this might lead to a net positive mass balance for Alpine glaciers this year, but at least in Switzerland (and I suspect elsewhere), it wasn't to be.  As reported today by the Swiss Academy of Sciences , glacier melt levels during this summer's heat waves reached record levels and in the net, glacier mass loss for the year exceeded accumulation, yielding a net mass loss of 2% of Switzerland's total glacier volume.  Over the past five years, the rate of mass loss exceeds anything previously observed in records that go back for more than a century.   Perhaps most disheartening is that eastern Switzerland saw exceptional snows during the winter, yet losses ...

Iceland's Okjökull glacier once capped the Ok Volcano, but was declared dead in 2014.  This past weekend, a plaque was placed on Ok that included a letter to the future. Source: Forbes/Boyer/Cymene Howe Talk about a great way to remind people that indeed we do know what is happening, but we also know what needs to be done.  Really, we have known this for some time, but the "cracks" in the climate system are really starting to open up now and people are seeing it with their own two eyes.  We could use a few more of these letters.  Here's one for the Wasatch Mountains. 

It was a pretty good snow year in the eastern Alps, but due to global warming, it's damn hard to have a year in which there isn't a net loss of glacier mass. When we left Innsbruck at the end of June, the seasonal snow still covered much of the high eastern Alps, but that's changed in the past three weeks.  Seasonal snow on the Hintereisferner, Austria's best studied glacier, is disappearing rapidly, leaving grey glacier ice.  Hintertuxer Glacier is Austria's only year-round ski area.  Here too, the deep seasonal snow cover is disappearing rapidly.  Finally, there is the Schneeferner on Zugspitze, which is to the right of the building pictured below. It's beginning to suffer too. I suspect at the end of summer, we'll see a net loss of mass for most of the glaciers in the eastern Alps.  Even in a good snow year, the summertime temperatures that exist today do their damage.  Additionally, the prolonged exposure of grey glacier ice results in ...

I am spending the first part of this week at the European Geophysical Union (EGU) meeting in Vienna.  One of the things that I like about meetings of this type is the opportunity to learn about advances in Earth sciences disciplines outside of the atmospheric sciences. Glaciology talks has always been a personal favorite because of my love for snow and ice and the fact that they contain many beautiful photos and analyses.  The science of glaciology has been transformed in recent years by advances in numerical modeling, observational techniques, and remote sensing from space, aircraft or the ground.  Sadly, these advances, while providing greater detail and information than ever before, confirm the dramatic loss of glacial ice that is occurring around the world. My host institution here in Austria, the University of Innsbruck, is a world leader in glaciology.  Glaciers that they study extensively include the Hintereisferner (HEF), Kesselwandferner (KWF) and G...

In desperate need of a brief vacation and a recharge of the batteries, we spent today at one of my favorite places in the world, Mt. Rainier National Park.  There's pretty much everything you could possibly want here: big relief, snow, ice, big trees, fascinating weather, amazing geology, and, to top it all off, Northwest beer.   We spent today at Sunrise on the northeast side of the park.  What's great about Sunrise is you can spend hours walking through meadows and alpine areas above timberline with very little climbing.  Further, you can gape at huge relief and the largest glacier in the lower 48, the Emmons.   In the photo below (click to enlarge), the summit of Mt. Rainier loops nearly 10,000 vertical feet above the upper White River Valley.  Little Tahoma, a peak reaching over 11,000 feet that would otherwise look like Mt. Hood, is dwarfed by the hulk of Rainier.  The Emmons Glacier issues from the summit of Mt. Rainier and descends into t...