How much can we save? Impact of different emission scenarios on future snow cover in the Alps

Marty, Christoph; Schlögl, Sebastian; Bavay, Mathias; Lehning, Michael

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-517-2017

Articles | Volume 11, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-517-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-517-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 11, issue 1

Research article

| Highlight paper

|

16 Feb 2017

Research article | Highlight paper |

| 16 Feb 2017

How much can we save? Impact of different emission scenarios on future snow cover in the Alps

Christoph Marty, Sebastian Schlögl, Mathias Bavay, and Michael Lehning

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Final revised paper (published on 16 Feb 2017)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 13 Oct 2016)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

SC1: 'Short comment on Marty et al.', Cenlin He, 01 Nov 2016
- AC1: 'Comment on review by C. HE', Christoph Marty, 23 Jan 2017
RC1: 'An overall nice and relevant paper with some issues to be solved', Anonymous Referee #1, 14 Nov 2016
- AC2: 'Comment on anonymous reviewer #1', Christoph Marty, 23 Jan 2017
RC2: 'Review of "How much can we save ..." by Christoph Marty et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 04 Dec 2016
- AC3: 'Comment of anonymous reviewer #2', Christoph Marty, 23 Jan 2017

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Christoph Marty on behalf of the Authors (23 Jan 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (Editor review) (24 Jan 2017) by Ross Brown

Hi Christoph - from my reading, the revised m/s addresses all the major points raised by the reviewers. However, there are a few places in the paper where some phrases are rather difficult to understand. I've highlighted a few of the obvious ones below. I recommend you ask an anglophone colleague or technical editor to proof-read the manuscript to streamline the text and improve readability.

Best regards, Ross B

1. In Section 3.5 the following addition does not read clearly:

"This is probably caused by the fact that this elevation zone is then closest to the 0°C limit. At higher reaches, many parts of the winter will still remain below the freezing level. At lower reaches the snow season is anyway too short to produce important reductions in the period length of continuous snow cover."

I suggest rewording along the lines of:
"This is probably caused by this elevation zone being closest to the 0°C limit. At higher elevations, air temperatures remain below-freezing for most of the winter period, while at lower elevations, the snow season is too short to for warming to generate large reductions in the period of continuous snow cover."

2. The following sentence in Section 3.7 is difficult to follow:

"Moreover, above this elevation glacier melt may decrease the spring snow albedo by dust from exposed moraine rubble and glacial till..."

I think you mean that increasing exposure of rubble and till from glacier melt augments the potential for deposition of dust on the glacier surface, contributing to a lowered surface albedo and a positive feedback that is not taken into account in the present modelling study.

3. The final sentence in the paper is not well-constructed and does not really follow from the preceding discussion. You also don't look at extreme snowfall events in this study so this final closing statement is not a strong way to finish. I suggest you remove it.

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AR by Christoph Marty on behalf of the Authors (25 Jan 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (26 Jan 2017) by Ross Brown

AR by Christoph Marty on behalf of the Authors (30 Jan 2017)

Short summary

We simulate the future snow cover in the Alps with the help of a snow model, which is fed by projected temperature and precipitation changes from a large set of climate models. The results demonstrate that snow below 1000 m is probably a rare guest at the end of the century. Moreover, even above 3000 m the simulations show a drastic decrease in snow depth. However, the results reveal that the projected snow cover reduction can be mitigated by 50 % if we manage to keep global warming below 2°.