Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research

About: Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research is a facility organization based out in Birmensdorf, Switzerland. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Climate change & Soil water. The organization has 1256 authors who have published 3222 publications receiving 161639 citations. The organization is also known as: WSL.

Winter Tourism and Climate Change in the Alps: An Assessment of Resource Consumption, Snow Reliability, and Future Snowmaking Potential

Abstract: The winter tourism industry is facing considerable challenges with climate change; it is increasingly responding with investments in snowmaking facilities. We present a study on 3 tourism destinations in the Swiss Alps that addressed resource consumption of snowmaking, snow reliability, and future snowmaking potential in a warmer climate. The energy consumption of snowmaking in the ski resorts was in the lower range of what could be expected from literature values. It comprised ∼0.5% of the respective municipality's energy consumption and was moderate compared with other tourism-related activities. Water consumption, however, was in the higher range with regard to what was expected from literature values and was also high compared with other water uses (eg 36% compared with drinking water consumption in one community). Natural snow cover was partly critical for winter sports at low elevations at ∼1200 masl, but uncritical at higher elevations above 2000 masl. Snow cover will become even more crit...

Regionalization of precipitation in Switzerland by means of principal component analysis

Abstract: The technique of principal component analysis and of cluster analysis has been applied to two sets of precipitation data in Switzerland, one containing 47 stations (1961-80), and the other 101 stations (1981-1993), with the aim of understanding more fully the spatial distribution of precipitation regimes. Seven regions were highlighted in the first case and 13 in the second. The high spatial coherence which appeared is quite remarkable and confirms the usefulness of these techniques for the analysis of the spatial distribution of meteorological variables, even in a topographically complex area such as Switzerland. The two regional distributions obtained not only correspond fairly well to the large, well-known physical regions of Switzerland, but also go much further, separating the Swiss Plateau into 3 clearly differentiated regions, for example. Regional distributions such as those discussed here can have value for climate change issues, and in particular numerical modeling of climate or climate change impacts on forests.