Long-term snowfall trends and variability in the Alps

Abstract

Snow is particularly impacted by climate change and therefore there is an urgent need to understand the temporal and spatial variability of depth of snowfall (HN) trends. However, the analysis of historical HN observations on large-scale areas is often impeded by lack of continuous long-term time series availability. This study investigates HN trends using observed time series spanning the period 1920–2020 from 46 sites in the Alps at different elevations. To discern patterns and variations in HN over the years, our analysis focuses also on key parameters such as precipitation (P), mean air temperature (TMEAN), and large-scale synoptic descriptors, that is, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Arctic Oscillation (AO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) indices. Our findings reveal that in the last 100 years and below 2000 m a.s.l., despite a slight increase in winter precipitation, there was a decrease in HN over the Alps, especially for southern and low-elevation sites. The South-West and South-East regions experienced an average loss of 4.9 and 3.8%/decade, respectively. A smaller relative loss was found in the Northern region (2.3%/decade). The negative HN trends can be mainly explained by an increase of TMEAN by 0.15°C/decade. Most of the decrease in HN occurred mainly between 1980 and 2020, as a result of a more pronounced increase in TMEAN. This is also confirmed by the change of the running correlation between HN and TMEAN, NAO, AO over time, which until 1980 were not correlated at all, while the correlation increased in later years. This suggests that in more recent years favourable combinations of temperature, precipitation, and atmospheric pattern have become more crucial for snowfall to occur. On the other hand, no correlation was found with the AMO index.