There are still about two months left in the usual ski season but snow levels are less than impressive at many of Australia’s alpine resorts.
James Wilson, a Sydney student, visits the snow twice a year. His trip to Thredbo this season was “the worst I’ve ever had anywhere”.
Piles of slush lined the bottom of the slopes. Everywhere else was covered in fake snow and any thin natural snow was flushed away in the wind.
“Even that was incredibly icy after a few hours of sunlight,” he said. “So many people I know got injured because of ice.”
Andrew Hamawy, a Sydney builder, cancelled his mid-August trip to Perisher because of similar conditions.
With only one chairlift operating and machine-made snow creating icy slopes, a friend there warned him there was no point in coming.
Hamawy has lost almost $2,000 on the trip.
He visits the snow up to four times a year. Generally trees are buried in snow and skiers are above the tree line when coming down slopes.
“Now we are seeing the tops of trees,” he said. “There is just not enough to be skiing down.
“You go to the snow because it is refreshing, but this is horrible. It’s not as enjoyable as it should be.”
Numerous factors may be influencing the lack of snow, including the climate crisis, which has increased global and local temperatures. Australia is on average 1.47C hotter than when national records began in 1910.
The peak snow depth has also been trending down in recent decades and the snow season has been getting shorter as the climate heats up.
But it may be too early to write off this year’s ski season, experts say, as snowfall in Australia’s snowfields tends to come in spurts and often peaks in spring.
The Bureau of Meteorology has forecast some decent falls for the weekend ahead and a light dusting over recent days has brought some relief.
“There have been times in the past when it started slow and we still got quite good late ski seasons,” Prof Neville Nicholls, a climate expert from Monash University, said.
Nicholls pointed out that snowfall varies greatly from year to year, with the biggest season in recent decades having peak snow depths almost nine times larger than the lowest year.
It has been a stop-start 2023 ski season. Some resorts received heavy snow early on only to have to close their runs in June after much of it disappeared.
Long-term averages show that most ski resorts will see only a handful of snowfall days a month in June and July.
The timing and quantity of these snow days is important to snow sports and the recorded snow depths. In 2014 many alpine resorts had more than 1 metre of snow fall over just a few days in early June.
“If you happen to have some big dumps of snow, like major frontal systems crossing south-east Australia, it takes quite a long time to melt,” University of Melbourne climate science lecturer Dr Andrew King said.
“But some winters you get them and some you don’t.”
Across the Australian Alps, a mountain range in south-east Australia that includes the Thredbo, Perisher and Mount Hotham ski resorts, temperatures were about 2C warmer than normal in July and with only about half as much precipitation.
Snowy Hydro has been recording snow depths at Spencers Creek near Perisher and Thredbo since the 1950s. The data shows a decline in average and peak snow depths over this period.
“We regularly used to get depths of 250cm. About every three or four years you’d get one of them,” Nicholls said. “We haven’t had one this century.
“We’re not getting the massive snow seasons we used to get.”
The decline in snow depths has largely been at the end of the season, leading to shorter seasons. Nicholls said this decline in snow in the tail end of the season is due to the increased warming from anthropogenic climate change.
“It’s not driven by changes in precipitation. It’s been driven by a gradual warming.”
It may take years to fully tease out all the factors affecting snow levels. Experts say the list of unknowns includes the water vapour dispersed by the 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano eruption.
But even though snow depths are low and the peaks have been trending downwards, the next big snow day could still be around the corner.
“I’ve been a climate scientist for 50 years,” Nicholls said. “I’ve spent a lot of time looking at snow over those years. And it’s still a complicated story.
“There’s nothing like a normal snow season.”
