Warming Facts – The Effects Global Warming will Have on Ski Weather
This is in no way a political or emotive piece about how we can find global warming solutions or avert climate change; I’m talking about the direct effect global warming and climate change will have on snow levels and ski weather in the next ninety years.
Excuse the pun, but whether we like it or not, this is certain – the world is getting warmer faster than it has ever done before. Cue heavy and sinister background music with cyclones, tornadoes and ripped up palm trees and we could easily be sucked into the final scene of an apocalypse, but that’s not the object here. It’s the effect that global warming will have on snow levels that is a concern as a skier. Last season had some of the biggest snow dumps ever – check this clip which demonstrates the current snow levels trend.
We are experiencing a staggering increase in the world’s temperature up to 2099 of around 6.4°C. This is a scientific estimate and roughly five times as much as the increase of the past century. Many people assume 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 highly unlikely.
We can only briefly and in the simplest terms describe how ‘precipitation’ (rain or snow) affects ski weather. Water vapour or hot wet air rises up from the equator, warmed up by the sun. This water vapour forms the continual circular weather systems in the north and south hemispheres as it cools and drops down, moved along by the earth’s rotational forces.
For our example let’s confine our discussion to the weather systems in the northern hemisphere where they move from west to east and the greatest proportion of the preciption occurs on continental landfall. As the warm, moist air in these systems hits Europe and North America, it is forced upwards by the mountains, cools and drops as either snow and rain.
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So if it’s hotter there will be increased precipitation in these countries as the sea will evaporate more readily. But will it be snow or will it be rain? This is the question. If the temperature will be 6.5°C higher by the end of the century we can deduce that the height where rain turns to snow will move up a mountain roughly 1000 metres during this time. This is because the temperature falls by about 6.5°C per 1000 metres of altitude. The precipitation will be more pronounced and the rain/snow level wil be travelling up the mountainside at a speed of roughly 10 metres a year.
Well, that’s it then – more snow. But it’s not that simple. What effect, for example, will the melting Greenland glaciers have on the Gulf Stream? It may not be the only question, but this is the big one. Known as the Atlantic conveyor this life giving current brings warm water up from the Gulf of Mexico past the western seaboard of Europe. Thirteen thousand years ago it suddenly stopped. The reason? A huge lake of cold fresh water burst its banks on the east coast of Canada and dropped into the North Atlantic, halting the Gulf Stream almost straightaway. The same pattern could emerge if the accelerated melting of the Greenland glaciers pours a massive amount 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 – Snow Levels
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