Snowcover in a Changing Climate

The aim of this project is to investigate past and future developments of the temporal variability, trends and possible seasonal shifts of parameters like snow fall, snow depth and total snow water equivalent in different altitude zones.

Snow influences life and society in an Alpine country like Switzerland in many ways. The amount and duration of snow in the Alps has a high economic significance in terms of tourism and hydropower. Many Alpine towns and villages heavily depend on snow, because their economy is dominated up to 90% by winter tourism. The vast majority of customers of such ski areas live in the pre-alpine regions of Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Italy. According to observations and climate change scenarios rising temperature heavily threaten the future snow cover in these regions.

Fig. 1: Relative snow depth per winter (Nov-Apr) compared to the mean of 1971-2000. Red means below average, blue above average snow depth (Grafik: C. Marty, SLF)

Fig. 2: Annual snow days anomalies in the Swiss plateau relative to the 1961-1990 mean (http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2008GL033998).

Fig. 3: Decline of snowfall to precipitation day ratio for different altitude classes. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2011GL046976).

Contact

• Christoph Marty