This past spring, I was lucky enough to work on a mini project for Jim Stock alongside my friend James Kitch exploring how climate change was likely to impact our local Nordic ski center, the Weston Ski Track. As snowfall is inconsistent in the Boston area, the center relies on snowmaking equipment that uses high-pressure cannons to throw a compressed air and water mixture into the sky where it freezes as snow (if you’ve ever skied on manmade snow you know it’s not quite the same). Snowmaking equipment requires certain conditions to run, for example, it has to be cold enough to freeze water in the air but not too cold such that the snowmaking pipes freeze. The amount of moisture in the air places further constraints on when snow can be made and wind speed constraints on snowmaking equipment also warrant consideration. The project’s goal was to show that even with future climate projections, there would still be enough snowmaking hours to make Boston area skiing possible. These results helped lobby for additional funding to expand the snowmaking capacity at Weston.

James and I used publicly available ERA5 reanalysis data, extracting temperature, precipitation, dewpoint, and windspeed conditions at Weston Ski Track (located 15 minutes outside of Boston), and computing snowmaking potential for the past 40 years. Below is a plot of snowmaking hours as a function of wet bulb temperature (temperature with air moisture content factored in). We see that average winter temperature is a powerful predictor of total possible snowmaking hours.

We also assessed how a 2°C increase in winter temperatures would impact snowmaking hours. While this does not capture increases in rain events (which melt snow) or perhaps best represent true predicted changes in temperature, it was a sufficient exercise to underscore that 1. snowmaking potential will still exist in the coming decades and that 2. additional snowmaking capacity to produce more snow when the conditions are cold enough at Weston can help address these changes. Think snow and ski fast! fast!