Earth’s sunscreen: What happens when snow disappears?

WASHINGTON: From Germany and France to the Czech Republic, many European ski resorts aren’t exactly a winter wonderland this season. Instead, lonely slopes covered with artificial snow sporadically dot the green and brown landscapes.

As emissions caused largely by burning fossil fuels continue to change the climate, temperatures are simply too warm to sustain snow.

Rain is falling instead of snow in many places. The consequences reach far beyond winter sports, harming water supply and biodiversity.

“Snow plays an important role in the water cycle,” said Daniel Farinotti, a glaciologist at the university ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research. “It retains the water for a certain time. Water found in snow doesn’t run off straight away but flows first in summer and spring.”

Only when the snow thaws, is meltwater gradually released into surrounding lakes, rivers and groundwater.

Snow acts like a kind of storage device and when there’s less or none of it, there’s less water later in the year.

Rivers fed partly by snowmelt also end up with lower water levels. That includes the Rhine, one of Europe’s most important waterways.

For the Rhine, meltwater reserves are crucial for making it through the drier summer and fall months.

“Melting glaciers and less snow could exacerbate low water levels in the Rhine from Basel to the North Sea,” said a study by the International Commission for the Hydrology of the Rhine Basin.

The association brings together different scientific organisations from countries through which the river flows.

Rainfall will likely not be able to make up for the lack of meltwater, according to the study. And a shallower Rhine impacts everyone who uses waterway.

Freight ships could be severely disrupted for an average of more than two months a year by the end of the century, the report said. Electricity production could be hampered.

Drinking water suppliers and farmers will likely have to prepare for more frequent shortages in hot, dry summers when water is in higher demand.

Artificial storage basins that collect rain in winter are required to make up for the lack of water caused by the dwindling snowmelt, said Marc Zebisch, a climate scientist with Eurac Research, an interdisciplinary research center based in South Tyrol, Italy.

But that would mean altering the natural environment, added Zebisch. There is also limited space in the mountains for such basins.

That’s why “when the risk of drought increases, we have to save water wherever we can,” said the researcher.

The agricultural sector in the southern Alps still wastes a lot of water, according to Zebisch. For example, farms use sprinklers, which lose the important resource to evaporation and leaks.

Farmers need to consider what kinds of crops can be grown in a drier environment in the future, said Robert Steiger, a geographer and tourism researcher at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

“In Italy’s Po valley, there are plans to grow much less rice because it requires a lot of water,” said Steiger.

Last summer the Po nearly dried out. Besides battling an extremely hot and dry period, Italy also struggled with a dearth of snow and rain the previous winter.

The combination caused water levels in many European rivers to reach dramatic lows.

Mountain regions are feeling the consequences of disappearing snow too. When heavy rain replaces snowfall, the risk of landslides increases, said Steiger. This worsens when snowmelt and heavy rain coincide.