Ski tourism is deeply rooted within the economies, culture and livelihoods of European countries, within and outside mountainous areas. Climate change impacts and risks are increasingly recognised as a major threat to ski tourism. Indeed, ski tourism relies on snow on ski slopes as its main resource. The natural snow cover is highly variable from year to year and is undergoing a substantial decline, especially at low elevation, due to rising temperature. In order to reduce the impact of the variability and reduction of the natural snow cover, and secure its operating conditions, the ski tourism industry has massively developed technical snowmaking, a.k.a. artificial snow. Artificial snow is usually produced early during the winter season, in order to provide a base layer required to fully exploit early natural snowfall and ensure, as often as possible, satisfying snow conditions for the critical season start, especially the Christmas holiday period, and then secure the rest of the winter season. Snowmaking bears a significant cost among ski resorts operating cost, hence optimising its use has a direct economic benefit (Figure 1). Furthermore, its operations use environmental resources such as water and energy. This impacts the local landscape, ecosystems and water cycle, and contributes to the broader environmental footprint of human activities at all spatial scales. Ski tourism therefore faces climate-related challenges at various interconnected time scales: how to efficiently adapt to ongoing climate change, now and in the future, using effective methods to cope with variable and declining snow cover, without committing to detrimental effects to the local and global environment in the long term ?
Several studies have documented the long term impacts and risks of various climate change scenarios on snow reliability in ski resorts in various mountain areas (IPCC, 2019). Complementary to long term climate change impact studies, the development of early warning systems is recognised to enhance the adaptation capacity of socio-economic sectors (IPCC, 2019). In this context, the initial motivation of the PROSNOW project was to contribute to developing early-warning systems to better cope with the impact of the variability of meteorological and snow conditions on ski resorts operating conditions and better adapt to increasingly challenging conditions in the future. One key requirement for early-warning systems is the provision of impact-based forecasts, at relevant time scales, designed to adapt operations, in real time, to expected upcoming conditions, in order to reduce their potential negative impacts or benefit from upcoming opportunities.
