Crossing numerical simulations of snow conditions with a spatially-resolved socio-economic database of ski resorts: A proof of concept in the French Alps

Snow on the ground is a critical resource for winter tourism in mountain regions and in particular ski tourism. Ski resorts are significantly vulnerable to the variability of meteorological conditions already at present and threatened by climate change in the longer term. Here we introduce an approach where detailed snowpack simulation results were crossed with a resort-level geographical and socio-economic database containing information from about 142 ski resorts spanning the entire French Alps domain. This allows us to take into account explicitly the geographical, topographical (altitude, slope and aspect) and spatial organization (distribution of ski-lifts and slopes) features of the ski resorts considered. A natural snow resort viability index was built using all the above information and simulated natural snow conditions from 2000 to 2012. Results were compared to economically relevant information (skier day values) highlighting a complex relationship between ski resort operation and natural snow conditions. The method introduced in this study holds great potential for physically-based and socio-economically-relevant analyses of the functioning of winter tourism economy and projections into the future under climate change conditions. This requires, however, that further improvements are carried out, in particular the explicit integration of snow management practices (e.g. snowmaking and grooming) into the modeling suite. •Snowpack simulations are crossed with a geospatial database of 100+ ski resorts•Location, altitude and ski-lift power of ski resorts are explicitly accounted for•Resort-level viability is computed based on a ski-lift power weighted 100 day rule•Natural snow conditions alone do not explain French Alps resorts frequentation•The developed framework is promising but snow management must be implemented explicitly