Abstract
Many ski resorts worldwide are going through deteriorating snow cover conditions due to anthropogenic warming trends. As the natural and the artificially supported, i.e., technical, snow reliability of ski resorts diminish, the industry approaches a deadlock. For this reason, impact assessment studies have become vital for understanding vulnerability of ski tourism. This study considers three resorts at one of the rapidly emerging ski destinations, Northeast Turkey, for snow reliability analyses. Initially one global circulation model is dynamically downscaled by using the regional climate model RegCM4.4 for 1971–2000 and 2021–2050 periods along the RCP4.5 greenhouse gas concentration pathway. Next, the projected climate outputs are converted into indicators of natural snow reliability, snowmaking capacity, and wind conditions. The results show an overall decline in the frequencies of naturally snow reliable days and snowmaking capacities between the two periods. Despite the decrease, only the lower altitudes of one ski resort would face the risk of losing natural snow reliability and snowmaking could still compensate for forming the base layer before the critical New Year’s week. On the other hand, adverse high wind conditions improve as to reduce the number of lift closure days at all resorts. Overall, this particular region seems to be relatively resilient against climate change.
Highlights
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects a global surface temperature rise of 0.3 to 4.8 ̋ C by the end of the 21st century, with respect to the 1986–2005 average [1], according to different pathways for increases in radiative forcing ranging within 2.6 to 8.5 W/m2 by the end of the 21st century with respect to the pre-industrial 1850–1900 period [2]
We aim at improving previous works [43,50,51,52,53] where snow reliability of ski resorts has been attempted to be examined through projections based on regional climate model outputs downscaled from various global circulation models (GCMs) for different greenhouse gas concentration pathways
The methodology has been comprised of two major parts, where initially the global circulation model, HadGEM2-ES of the Met Office Hadley Centre, has been dynamically downscaled to 10 km by using the regional climate model RegCM4.4 for the 1971–2000 control period and the 2021–2050 future period along the RCP4.5 greenhouse gas concentration pathway
Summary
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects a global surface temperature rise of 0.3 to 4.8 ̋ C by the end of the 21st century, with respect to the 1986–2005 average [1], according to different pathways for increases in radiative forcing ranging within 2.6 to 8.5 W/m2 by the end of the 21st century with respect to the pre-industrial 1850–1900 period [2]. At high-mountain regions, warming and its impacts are amplified even further due to various mechanisms [4]. Ski tourism, as an industry dependent on snowy mountainous terrains, is claimed to be “the most directly and the most immediately affected”. The ski tourism industry yields 400 million visits annually and has become an essential component of socioeconomic development for certain regions such as the Alps and some recently emerging destinations such as China, Russia, and Turkey [7]. Climate change remains to be a major threat to this impetus with the negative impacts already felt worldwide. In some of the past anomalously warm seasons, losses of skier visits up to 11%–12% were recorded in the US and the
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