Artificial snow making in the Southern Black Forest

摘要

Ski resorts react to warm winter seasons by investing in snowmaking. But snowmaking in warm winter seasons is at risk, because sufficiently low temperatures become less frequent in the future.In the study area of the Black Forest, Germany the region of Feldberg is the biggest ski area in Baden-Wurttemberg with 14 lifts and 16 ski slopes. The impact of climate change is extraordinary important, because for the whole area the winter tourism is the main source of revenue. The study area is in an altitudinal range from 850m – 1450 m. At the moment in 1/3 of the Feldberg area it is possible to work with artificial snowmaking. In the near future, till 2020,an artificial snowmaking of the whole Feldberg area is planned. On the basis of this, more detailed investigations of season length and the needed volume of produced snow are necessary. A ski season simulation model ("SkiSim 2.0") developed at the Department of Geography University Innsbruck, Austria was applied in order to assess the snow potential of natural and technical snow for today and for the climate scenarios A I B and B1 based on the regional climate models (REMO and CLM). In addition the model has been fitted with climate data from stations of the German Weather Service. The model operates and produces the monthly changes from 1961- 2100 of the two emission scenarios (A I B and B1). These changes are downscaled to each weather station with a weather generator ("LARS-WG") producing daily data as input for SkiSim which calculates snow depth (natural and technically produced snow) and the required amount of artificial snow for 100 m altitudinal bands.