What is ClimSnow?
Carlo Carmagnola, researcher at Météo France and business manager at the Dianeige study office :
This is what we call a climate service, or a decision support tool which was developed 2 years ago to help resorts plan for major developments to be made in the medium and long term. This system makes it possible to see the evolution of snow cover following the effects of climate change; and therefore in practice it allows to see for each ski slope how much snow we will have, how many days of skiing we will be able to do by the end of the century.
You place yourself on the scale of the track, the slope, the sector: it’s very precise!
Absolutely: we are able to cut the ski resorts into small sectors, sub-pieces of track, and we can have several tens or even hundreds of them per ski area. And on each sector, the climate projections that we make are able to take into account the local topography, in particular the altitude, the orientation, and the slope of each zone. The models over the last few years have evolved to the point where we are able to provide resorts with fairly clear information on the future of their snow cover. We carry out studies that are neutral, scientific, we have no bias and we do not want to engage in the developments behind them. On the other hand, the stations have all the elements to understand what could or could not be done according to our results.
Do you also take artificial snow into account?
Absolutely: the model takes into account the topography but also the equipment specific to each station (whether for grooming or artificial snow), and this in its current state and also in the projects. One of the strengths of ClimSnow is to be able to say how the resort will be able to cope with the effects of climate change if we keep the current equipment, and what happens if we make modifications , extensions, where any kind of change.
How have the stations been doing so far?
They asked themselves questions of course because this is not new, but until recently we had no tools capable of answering these questions. So the interest of ClimSnow is really to be able to combine on the one hand the latest developments in scientific models which allow us to answer certain questions quite clearly, and on the other hand the expressed need, now identified by stations.