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Posts Tagged ‘ski weather’

We are talking about snow levels here and how changes in the climate will affect our ski weather for the next ninety years; we are not looking for global warming solutions or going near the politics.

Forgive the pun, but whether we like it or not, there’s no doubt the world is warming up faster than ever known. Bring in heavy and sinister orchestral music with thunderstorms, tornadoes and tsunamis and we could easily be sucked into the end scene of an apocalypse, but that’s not my purpose here. It’s the effect that global warming will have on snow levels that interests me as a skier. Last winter had some of the biggest snow dumps ever – check this clip which demonstrates the current snow levels trend.

In the space of the next hundred years there maybe a maximum increase of up to 6.4°C in worldwide temperatures, which is approximately five times the surge during the whole of the last century. A lot of people think that the snow will melt away, like the glaciers are doing, all together, and rain will be predominant, or that there will no rain either, but this is not the case.

We’ve only time to discuss quite briefly and simplistically here how ‘precipitation’ (rain or snow) affects ski weather. Surface water at the equator rises into the atmosphere as water vapour heated by the sun, and is propelled northwards (above the equator) and southwards (south of the equator) by the earth’s rotation. As the water vapour cools down it falls and forms the huge circular weather systems we are familiar with.

North of the equator, for example, the major weather systems make their way from west to east because of the earth’s rotation and precipitation mainly occurs as these systems hit the land. And the landmass we are looking at here is the west coast of America (the Rockies) and the west coast of Europe (the Alps). As we all know, the warm moist air rises up over the Rockies and the Alps where it either snows or rains.

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Now we can be fairly certain, because the earth is getting warmer, that there will be more water in the form of vapour drawn up from the equator. But will it metamorphose into rain or snow after it’s long trip to the mountains?. If the Earth’e temperature rises by 6.4°C this century it will mean that the rain snow boundary on a mountain will move upwards. If for example the snow level on a mountainside is at 1000 metres, by the the end of this century it will have risen to 2000 metres because the temperature falls by roughly 6.5°C per 1000 metres. The precipitation will be more pronounced and the rain/snow level wil be moving up the mountain at a speed of roughly 10 metres each year.

Well, that’s it then – more snow. But it’s not that easy. What effect, for example, will the melting Greenland glaciers have on the Gulf Stream? There are other questions too, but this is the big one. Presently, this fast moving mass of warm seawater, coming up from the Equator, protects western Europe from the cold winters usual at that latitude. But thirteen thousand years ago an inland sea in Canada brought the Gulf Stream to a halt when it overflowed its banks, dropping into the Atlantic and starting an Ice Age in Europe. The same pattern could emerge if the accelerated melting of the Greenland glaciers pours unprecedented amounts of cold fresh water into the Gulf Stream and click – it switches off. Then we would have more snow than we bargained for…

For the full article and more visit Ski Jungle – Global Warming Facts