Ski tourism has long been identified to be particularly impacted by past and future climate change, due the increase in air temperature and related decrease in natural snow reliability in mountain areas. A meaningful quantification of climate change risks to ski tourism requires to assess relevant indicators, and take into account snow management, such as grooming and snowmaking, which are pivotal to ski resorts activities and exert a strong influence on their operating conditions. Over the past decades, knowledge and tools have been developed to better quantify climate change impacts to ski tourism operating conditions, especially in Europe and North America, and underpin dedicated climate services tailored to this economic sector. The webinar “Climate services relevant to ski tourism” brings together leading experts in climate services development and climate change impacts to ski tourism, along with innovative solutions to better anticipate decisions for snow management in ski resorts and, therefore, increase their resilience against climate change while reducing their environmental footprint through optimized use of critical resources (water, energy). The webinar will provide a comprehensive overview of the state of knowledge regarding climate change risks to ski resorts operations, and introduce existing and emerging services used to inform climate change adaptation in mountain destinations (including diversification of the tourism offer) and to better manage snow on ski pistes along the snow season.
This webinar is organized by the Horizon 2020 project PROSNOW, which from 2017 to 2020 has developed a prediction system allowing for management and optimization of snow in Alpine ski resorts, based on meteorological and seasonal forecasts, snow cover modeling and in-situ observations relevant to snow management. The webinar is supported by Copernicus Climate Change Services, in particular its novel “Mountain Tourism Meteorological and Snow Indicators“ dataset, the H2020 project Climateurope, and is organized in cooperation with the Horizon 2020 project Blue-Action.