The future for ski sports in Switzerland looks anything but rosy – or rather white. Current climate models predict that there will be more precipitation in winter in the coming decades, but that it will fall as rain instead of snow. Despite this, one investor recently spent several million Swiss francs on expanding the Andermatt-Sedrun-Disentis ski resort. A short-sighted decision they will regret in future?
A research team led by Dr. Erika Hiltbrunner from the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Basel has now calculated the extent to which this ski resort can maintain its economically important Christmas holidays and a ski season of at least 100 days with and without snowmaking. The team collected data on the aspects of the slopes, where and when the snow is produced at the ski resort and with how much water. They then applied the latest climate change scenarios (CH2018) in combination with the SkiSim 2.0 simulation software for projections of snow conditions with and without technical snowmaking. The results of their investigations were recently published in the International Journal of Biometeorology.
No guarantee of a white Christmas
According to the results, the use of technical snow can indeed guarantee a 100-day ski season – in the higher parts of the ski resort (at 1,800 meters and above), at least. But business is likely to be tight during the Christmas holidays in coming decades, with the weather often not cold enough at this time and in the weeks before. In the scenario with unabated greenhouse gas emissions, the Sedrun region in particular will no longer be able to offer guaranteed snow over Christmas in the longer term. New snow guns may alleviate the situation to a certain extent, say the researchers, but will not resolve the issue completely.