Where’s All The Snow?

Brian Merchant flags the NASA’s satellite photos of Sochi:

Satellites don’t lie, and Sochi doesn’t have much snow. Meteorologists say that enough has fallen to ensure high quality competition for the Winter Games, but from space, it looks pretty sparse. Despite a national initiative to import half a million tons of snow and a Herculean snow-making effort that helped the Russian city produce 1,000 football fields worth of powder, humans weren’t able to add a whole lot of white to Sochi’s arid ridges.

Tim McDonnell interviews Porter Fox, author of Deep: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow, about the impact of climate change on the Winter Olympics:

Sochi is a very interesting situation. I didn’t study it particularly in the book but I’ve been keeping up on it ever since, and it’s a bit of a disaster right now.

They stored, I believe, 16 million cubic feet of snow last season to use this season in case this happened. And they did that because they had to cancel several exhibition events last year in February, because it was too warm and there was no snow. It already happened last year. They bulldozed all this snow into giant piles, covered it with insulating tarps and basically kept it cold for this season so they can bulldoze it back onto the slopes, which looks like exactly what they’re going to have to do. If you look at the Whistler Olympics, they had to do the same thing. They weren’t prepared for it, so they lifted by helicopter tons of snow onto the slopes so they could do the skiing events. But it’s a sign — it’s a sign of things to come. It’s going to be harder and harder to find a solid snowpack as the decades pass.

(Photo from NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team.)