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Theor Appl Climatol (2012) 110:573583 DOI 10.1007/s00704-012-0584-3
ORIGINAL PAPER
Long-term snow and weather observations at Weissfluhjoch and its relation to other high-altitude observatoriesin the Alps
Christoph Marty & Roland Meister
Received: 28 September 2011 /Accepted: 3 January 2012 /Published online: 18 January 2012 # Springer-Verlag 2012
Abstract Snow and weather observations at Weissfluhjoch were initiated in 1936, when a research team set a snow stake and started digging snow pits on a plateau located at 2,540 m asl above Davos, Switzerland. This was the beginning of what is now the longest series of daily snow depth, new snow height and bi-monthly snow water equivalent measurements from a high-altitude research station. Our investigations reveal that the snow depth at Weissfluhjoch with regard to the evolution and inter-annual variability represents a good proxy for the entire Swiss Alps. In order to set the snow and weather observations from Weissfluhjoch in a broader context, this paper also shows some comparisons with measurements from five other high-altitude observatories in the European Alps. The results show a surprisingly uniform warming of 0.8C during the last three decades at the six investigated mountain stations. The long-term snow measurements reveal no change in midwinter, but decreasing trends (especially since the 1980s) for the solid precipitation ratio, snow fall, snow water equivalent and snow depth during the melt season due to a strong temperature increase of 2.5C in the spring and summer months of the last three decades.
1 Introduction
Mountains played a central role in the history of meteorology. From the 1860s onwards, meteorologists began to recognise that the vertical structure of the atmosphere holds important clues to large-scale weather trends. They began to
distinguish between valley measurements, which reflected local peculiarities, and measurements taken at high-altitude observatories, which revealed general characteristics of the atmospheric circulation (Coen 2009). However, meteorological measurements at the mountain observatory Weissfluhjoch (WFJ) above Davos started for a totally different reason. In December 1936, a research team of the Swiss Snow and Avalanche Research Commission appeared on the Weissfluhjoch, where a few years later, the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche research (SLF) was founded. They set a snow stake and started digging snow pits on a plateau situated at 2,540 m asl. The goal of...