Climate controls on snow reliability in French Alps ski resorts (original) (raw)
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Climate change impacts on the snow reliability of French Alps ski resorts
2018
The recent evolutions of snowmaking as a mitigation method to address the interannual variability and decrease of natural snow conditions in past decades hampers any relevant investigation of the impacts of climate change on ski resorts activity without accounting for this technology. We introduce here an original approach based on a physically based snowpack model forced by adjusted EURO-CORDEX data over the French Alps, crossed with spatial representations of ski areas, to provide detailed snow conditions at the scale of a single ski resort. Based on 129 French Alps ski resorts (totaling more than 90% capacity), snow reliability indicators were computed with this approach and proved significantly correlated with annual skier days and water requirements for snowmaking. Snowmaking appears as an efficient mitigation method for the near future (2030 – 2050), by means of a significant increase of water requirements due to both the projected increase of surface area equipped with snowma...
Past changes in natural and managed snow reliability of French Alps ski resorts from 1961 to 2019
The Cryosphere, 2022
Snow reliability is a key climatic impact driver for the ski tourism industry, although there are only a few studies addressing past changes in snow reliability in ski resorts accounting for snow management practices (grooming and snowmaking, in particular). This study provides an assessment of past changes in natural and managed snow cover reliability from 1961 to 2019 in the French Alps. In particular, we used snowmaking investment figures to infer the evolution of snowmaking coverage at the ski resort scale for 16 ski resorts in the French Alps, which we used together with a detailed snow cover modelling system driven by a local atmospheric reanalysis. We find different benefits of snow management to reduce the variability and long-term decrease in snow cover reliability because of the heterogeneity of the snowmaking deployment trajectories across ski resorts. The frequency of challenging conditions for ski resort operation over the 1991-2019 period increased in November and February to April compared to the 30-year reference period 1961-1990. In general, snowmaking had a positive impact on snow reliability, especially in December to January. While for the highest-elevation ski resorts, snowmaking improved snow reliability for the core of the winter season, it did not counterbalance the decreasing trend in snow cover reliability for lower-elevation ski resorts and in the spring.
Snowmaking and climate change: Future options for snow production in Tyrolean ski resorts
Mountain Research and Development, 2008
Winter tourism is highly sensitive to climate change. The sufficiently studied altitudinallydependent line of natural snow-reliability is loosing its relevance to ski lift operators in Austria, where 59% of the skiing area is covered by artificial snowmaking. But the diffusion of snowmaking facilities cannot be linked to climate change monocausally, because trends in tourism, prestige and competitive advantage are important factors. Despite the fact that snowmaking is limited by climatological factors, ski lift operators trust in technical improvements and believe the future will not be as menacing as assumed by recent climate change impact studies. This study´s aim is to define reasons for the diffusion of snowmaking systems and to assess, if snowmaking can be a viable adaptation strategy in spite of an ongoing warming using a simple degree-day model. The results of the presented method to assess technical snow reliability show, that current snowmaking intensity will not be sufficient to guarantee a desired 100-days season at elevations below 1500-1600 m. Snowmaking will climatically still be possible even at lower elevations, but the needed intensification of the capacity will lead to significantly rising operation costs.
The Cryosphere, 2019
Climate change is increasingly regarded as a threat for winter tourism due to the combined effect of decreasing natural snow amounts and decreasing suitable periods for snowmaking. The present work investigated the snow reliability of 175 ski resorts in France (Alps and Pyrenees), Spain and Andorra under past and future conditions using stateof-the-art snowpack modelling and climate projections using Representative Concentration Pathways RCP2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. The natural snow reliability (i.e. without snowmaking) elevation showed a significant spatial variability in the reference period (1986-2005) and was shown to be highly impacted by the ongoing climate change. The reliability elevation using snowmaking is projected to rise by 200 to 300 m in the Alps and by 400 to 600 m in the Pyrenees in the near future (2030-2050) compared to the reference period for all climate scenarios. While 99 % of ski lift infrastructures exhibit adequate snow reliability in the reference period when using snowmaking, a significant fraction (14 % to 25 %) may be considered in a critical situation in the near future. Beyond the mid-century, climate projections highly depend on the scenario with either steady conditions compared to the near future (RCP2.6) or continuous decrease in snow reliability (RCP8.5). Under RCP8.5, our projections show that there would no longer be any snow-reliable ski resorts based on natural snow conditions in the French Alps and Pyrenees (France, Spain and Andorra) at the end of the century (2080-2100). For this time period and this scenario, only 24 resorts are projected to remain reliable with snowmaking, all being located in the Alps.
The international ski tourism industry is highly vulnerable to inter-annual climate variability and climate change. Accordingly, there is a strong need to advance our understanding of climate risk for this multi-billion tourism market that is so important to mountain regions around the world. This study addressed major limitations in the ski tourism literature, while concurrently supporting priority information needs of ski tourism stakeholders. An improved version of SkiSim 2.0 is applied to all 34 alpine ski areas in southern Ontario (Canada) to examine potential changes in the capacity of this regional marketplace. Model improvements include differential snowmaking capacities of individual ski areas, updated snowmaking decision rules, as well as a new indicator, termed 'terrain-days', to estimate changes in system capacity. The results project two fundamentally different futures for this ski tourism marketplace under climate change. If the international community succeeds in achieving the + 2°C Paris Agreement policy goal, then losses in system capacity can be limited to less than 10% in the mid-and late-century. In contrast, a high-end emission scenario (RCP 8.5) would severely disrupt this ski tourism market by mid-century, with system capacity losses between 28% and 73%.
The vulnerability of Pyrenean ski resorts to climate-induced changes in the snowpack
Climatic Change, 2015
Winter tourism is the main source of income and the driving force of local development in many mountain areas. However, in recent years the industry has been identified as being extremely vulnerable to future climate change. Although the Pyrenees has the largest ski area in Europe after the Alps, there are few detailed climate-change vulnerability assessments on the ski resorts based in this region. This paper analyzes the vulnerability of the Pyrenean ski resorts to projected changes in the snowpack under various future climate scenarios. In addition, the study analyzes the sustainability of the snowmaking systems to offset the climate variability of natural snow cover. On average, the study predicts a shorter ski-season length, especially in low-altitude ski resorts in a moderate climate-change scenario and for all ski resorts in a more intensive climatechange scenario. However, a significant regional variability has been identified for the projected impacts at very short geographical distances within the studied area. Moreover, this paper shows that snowmaking cannot completely solve the problem for all ski resorts in the Pyrenees, as the measure can only act as a robust adaptation strategy in the region provided climate change is limited to +2 °C snowmaking.
Regional Environmental Change, 1999
Possible climate change will modify snowcover depth and change the characteristics of winter tourism and skiing districts. Our model describes seasonal snow-cover depth related to altitude in six Alpine climate regions as the best ®t of all snow stations. Data cover 30 winter seasons (November to April values) from 1965 to 1995. We modi®ed the data according to a scenario of temperature and precipitation change (2°C warming, no precipitation change) and achieve a new simulated snow-cover depth. The indicators MARP (mean altitude of resident population) and MASPSL (mean altitude of starting point of ski lifts) serve as references for``critical altitudes'' of Austrian districts. A warming implies a reduction of snow in all districts, but the loss is overproportional in lower altitudes. The direction of economic impacts is clear ± income losses and adaptation costs ± but magnitude and time frames remain uncertain.
The impact of climate change analogue conditions on ski operations is broader than reported in previous studies. Ski operations under anomalously warm temperatures are not binary, but a continuum of partial capacity. Differential vulnerabilities are recorded by ski resort size (i.e., small, intermediate and large resorts) and month. Ski demand is less sensitive to record warm conditions than supply-side operations. a b s t r a c t To accurately characterize the ski industry's risk to future climate change and varied quality of snow conditions, it is important to assess how the industry has managed and adapted to contemporary anomalously warm ski seasons. This is the first temporal climate change analogue study to use higher resolution daily performance data at the individual ski area scale, including reported snow quality, ski lift operations, slope openings, and water usage for snowmaking. The record warm winter of 2011e2012 in the Ontario ski tourism market (Eastern Canada) is representative of projected future average winter conditions under a mid-century, high greenhouse gas emissions scenario (RCP 8.5), which was compared to the 2010e2011 season which was climatically normal (for the 1981e2010 period). Supply-side impacts across the 17 ski areas during the analogue winter included a total average decrease in the ski season length (À17% days), operating ski lifts (À3%), skiable terrain (À9%), reduced snow quality (e.g.,-46% days with packed powder), snowmaking days (À18%), and an increase in water usage for snowmaking (e.g., þ300% in December). Demand-side impacts include a 10% decrease in overall skier visits, with a resort size-correlation (small À20%, intermediate À14%, large À8%). With reduced operational ski terrain and more frequent marginal snow conditions, visitor experience is adversely affected more frequently. Collectively, these findings identify differential impacts in the ski tourism market and can assist ski area managers, communities, investors and governments with developing climate change adaptation plans.