Climate Change Is Rewriting the Rules of Avalanche Prediction
A series of tragic deaths in Canada, the United States, and Europe has thrown the challenge of avalanche forecasting back into sharp relief, and scientists are warning that climate change is making the problem significantly harder.
Avalanche prediction has always been a probabilistic science rather than a certain one: even the best forecasters are dealing with complex, dynamic snowpack conditions that can change rapidly and where local variation can be extreme. Climate change is adding new layers of complexity to an already difficult problem.
How Climate Change Affects Snowpack
Traditionally, avalanche science has relied on understanding seasonal patterns: how snow accumulates, how it metamorphoses over time, and what conditions create unstable layering. Climate warming is disrupting these patterns in several ways.
Rain-on-snow events, which can create particularly dangerous crusts and weak layers, are becoming more common at higher elevations. Temperature swings that would previously have happened only in spring are now occurring mid-winter. And the timing and character of storm cycles is shifting in ways that don't fit historical models well.
The Human Exposure Problem
At the same time that avalanche prediction is getting harder, backcountry use has surged across Canada following the pandemic-era outdoor recreation boom. More people are in avalanche terrain with less historical precedent for the conditions they're encountering.
For Ottawa and Ontario residents who travel to backcountry areas in winter, the Ottawa Valley, Algonquin, or further west to alpine terrain, the combination of changing conditions and greater exposure deserves serious attention.
What Responsible Backcountry Users Should Do
The fundamentals haven't changed: check avalanche forecasts from Avalanche Canada or Parks Canada before heading out, carry beacon, probe, and shovel, know how to use them, and never go alone into serious terrain. But the forecasts are becoming less certain, which means the margins for error are also shrinking.
Source: CBC News
