GENEVA (AP) – Much of the Alps just doesn’t look right for this time of year. Sparse snowfall and unseasonably warm winter weather in Europe’s central mountains are causing slopes throughout the region to become grass-covered, causing a headache for ski slope operators and alpine white lovers.
Patches of grass, rock and dirt were visible on Monday in some of Europe’s ski meccas – like Innsbruck in Austria, Villars-sur-Ollon and Crans-Montana in Switzerland, and Germany’s Lenggries and far beyond. The lack of snow has revived concerns about temperature fluctuations linked to climate change.
In a swath that stretched from France to Poland but with the Alps at its heart, many parts of Europe enjoyed short-sleeved weather. A weather map showed that Poland has seen daily highs in the double-digit degrees Celsius — or more than 50 Fahrenheit — in recent days.
It’s a sharp contrast to the cold weather and snowstorms in parts of the United States late last year.
The Swiss weather service MeteoSuisse pointed to some of the hottest temperatures this time of year. A weather station in Delémont in the Jura on the French border hit a record daily average temperature of 18.1 degrees Celsius (nearly 65 Fahrenheit) on the first day of the year, over 2-1/2 degrees Celsius higher than the previous record high for January. Other cities and communities followed suit with records.
MeteoSuisse joked in her blog: “… this turn of the year could almost make you forget that it’s winter.”
MeteoSuisse forecaster Anick Haldimann said a sustained weather system that brought warmer air from the west and south-west has lingered and is including warmer temperatures expected to continue throughout the week. While slopes over 2,000 meters (over 6,500 feet) have received snow, further down “patience is the order of the day” for ski fans, she said.
The shortage has been particularly distressing in Switzerland’s Adelboden, which hosts Saturday’s World Cup skiing and generally attracts 25,000 fans in a single day of racing. Resorts like these look to such races to lure amateur skiers with idyllic winter imagery, but grassy, brown sides of the track can spoil the scenery — and dampen its appeal.
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Course director Toni Hadi confirmed that the race will be held 100% on artificial snow this year.
“The climate is changing a bit, but what are we supposed to do here? Shall we stop living?” he said over the phone, noting that other challenges such as the coronavirus pandemic and war show that “life is not easy these days”.
“Everything is difficult – not just preparing a ski slope,” said Hadi.
The start of 2023 picked up where many countries had already left off: in both Switzerland and France, the past year was the hottest on record. More broadly, the United Nations World Meteorological Organization says the past eight years are on track to become the eighth warmest on record. The final balance of global temperature values for 2022 will be published in mid-January.
Next door in France, national weather agency Meteo France said 2022 ended with some of the warmest weather conditions the country has ever experienced at this time of year – capping an exceptionally warm year that saw temperature records broken and experienced rampant wildfires and drought conditions.
Meteo France says near-normal snowfall was recorded in the Southern Alps and in the Northern Alps on slopes over 2,200 meters. But at lower altitudes in the northern Alps and above the Pyrenees, there is a particular lack of snow, it said.
Of course, the Alps cover a lot of territory and not everything is snow-free: Perhaps counterintuitively, some of the best snowfall has been reported in the Italian Dolomites south of the Swiss Alps.
The start of the ski season was looking good for snow lovers: in France, freezing cold weather through mid-December raised hopes that ski resorts in the Alps, Pyrenees and elsewhere could see plenty of early snow and the sustained sub-zero temperatures needed to keep runs going open.
However, exceptionally warm weather ensued, causing some resorts at lower elevations to close as the snowpack melted.
“It was a good start to the season with a mid-December cold snap that brought some whiteness to pretty much everyone. Then, last week, there was quite a lot of rain and warm temperatures, so a certain number of runs had to be closed again,” Laurent Reynaud of the industry group Domaines Skiables de France, which represents French ski resorts, lift operators and others, told C-News -TV.
Germany too has experienced unusually spring-like temperatures – up to 16 degrees Celsius (61 Fahrenheit) in parts of the country on Monday. New Year’s Eve is believed to have been the warmest since reliable records began. The German weather service reported readings of 20 degrees Celsius and just above at four weather stations in southern Germany, the dpa news agency reported.
Wim Thiery, a professor of climate science at the University of Brussels, said the same jet stream that drew cold air from the Arctic to the US is blowing warm air from subtropical zones to Europe. He warned that unless people reduce their use of fuels that trap heat in the atmosphere, climate change hasn’t finished its work.
“By the end of the century, (it) will just be over… Alpine skiing as we know it,” he said, adding that the lower mountain regions are already feeling the effects. “In the future, these problems will only get worse because snow will continue to melt as the climate warms.”
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Leicester reported from Paris. Geir Moulson contributed from Berlin.