Copernicus Service catalogue

This application explores how the percentage of winter (December-January) precipitation that falls as snow might change over the coming decades, driven by snowfall and rainfall data from the sixth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6).

Recent studies have suggested that rain may replace snow as the most common precipitation in the Arctic – possibly within the next 50 years. This could have profound implications, from accelerating global warming and sea level rise to melting permafrost and sinking roads. This application explores whether Europe may see a similar shift in winter precipitation from snow to rain, particularly over the Christmas period.

This application visualises projections of the percentage of total precipitation which will fall as snow over the Christmas period, underpinned by multi-model projections of monthly mean (December-January) snowfall flux and total precipitation from 12 CMIP6 models for the years 2015-2100. Three different Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) have been included to account for a range of different end-of-century climate change outcomes: SSP1-2.6 (warming limited to 2°C by 2100), SSP2-4.5 (warming limited to 3°C by 2100) and SSP5-8.5 (a worst-case scenario). The proportion of total precipitation that reaches the Earth's surface as snow has been calculated by dividing the snowfall flux by total precipitation flux, and applying a 10-year rolling average in order to account for uncertainty in annual variations in the projections.

The application interface comprises an interactive map showing the percentage of precipitation falling as snow over the Christmas period for the years 2020-2095, averaged over Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) level 2 regions. Selecting a NUTS region generates a region-specific breakdown of the projected percentage of December-January precipitation that will fall as snow:

• a graph comparing the multi-model mean and uncertainty for the three different SSPs described above;
• "snow stripes" - a visualisation of the annual December-January snowfall as a proportion of total precipitation, on a scale of white-to-dark green representing the years with the highest proportion of precipitation falling as snow (white) and the lowest proportion of precipitation falling as snow (dark green) in the selected region.