Abstract
Abstract. 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.
Highlights
Ski tourism is a major socio-economic component of mountainous regions for many countries around the world (Vanat, 2020)
Investment choices directly affect the increase in the snowmaking coverage for each ski resort: the snowmaking coverage rates range from 0 % to 37 % in 1997 and from 14 % to almost 70 % in 2018
This study provides an original appraisal of the time evolution of snow cover reliability, based on a detailed modelling framework enabling the computation of a resort-level snow reliability indicator, spanning the time period from 1961 to 2019 for multiple ski resorts
Summary
Ski tourism is a major socio-economic component of mountainous regions for many countries around the world (Vanat, 2020). While several studies have documented strong reductions in snow cover amount, depth and duration in many mountain regions of the world over the past decades (Mote et al, 2018; Klein et al, 2016; Marty et al, 2017; Matiu et al, 2021; Hock et al, 2019), explicit assessments of the impact of climate change on ski resort operations, based on past observations, have remained limited (Beaudin and Huang, 2014; Hamilton et al, 2003; Rutty et al, 2017; Steiger, 2011). The emergence in past decades and popularization in major news media of several studies addressing future climate change risks to ski tourism, together with the recurrence of snow-scarce winters in Europe (Durand et al, 2009) and North America (Cooper et al, 2016), have somehow led to the broadly accepted consideration that climate change has already been having a strong impact on ski resort operations in the past and at present (Knowles and Scott, 2020).
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