Researchers turn to artificial intelligence to model how snow cover is shrinking

In a leafy courtyard in the northern Italian city of Bolzano, children chase each other around as daycare workers look on, interns sip cappuccinos, and researchers hustle past on their way to the lab.

In the distance, pine-covered mountains rise in all directions like majestic gatekeepers. The famed Dolomites of the Italian Alps are breathtakingly beautiful, but also stark reminders of how climate change is making snowy peaks more unpredictable.

In July, 11 hikers were killed when record-high temperatures contributed to a massive chunk of the Marmolada Mountain Glacier breaking loose. The shrinkage of glaciers and a decline in snowfall also led to the drying out of the Po, Italy's longest and most important river for agriculture and hydroelectrical power.

This week, as world leaders prepared to meet in Egypt for the COP27 climate change conference starting Sunday, a UN report warned glaciers around the globe, including the last one in Africa, will be gone by 2050.

Here in Bolzano, researchers with the private clean energy research group Eurac have pieced together a long-range picture of how snow cover around the world has already changed, using modelling and artificial intelligence.

Their study, published in Nature's Scientific Reports, found that globally, it's been decreasing over the past 38 years, with four per cent less mountain area covered with snow, and an average of 15 more snow-free days per year.

In the Rockies, the study found the number of days with no snow cover reached as many as 30 at certain times and areas, with a slight increase of snow in tiny micro-climates.

"The warming of the minimum temperature, as well as decreasing in winter precipitation and more [rain] … can make the melting phase faster," said Claudia Notarnicola, the scientist with the Institute for Earth Observation at Eurac who led the study. 

"The strongest effect we see is the anticipation of the melting season, [spring temperatures] coming earlier."

Eurac's work happens at a facility called the Nature of Innovation (Noi) Tech Park, which a century ago was the site of Italy's burgeoning aluminum production, one of the most energy-intensive and polluting industries, launched by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. 

At its peak, the area produced a third of the country's aluminum, until production petered out due to global competition and ended in the 1980s.

Today, converted factories, along with modern constructions, are part of the expanding hub for environmental innovation and research — housing everything from start-ups and clean energy labs to environmental agencies, a university campus and daycare.

"In this [region of] South Tyrol, nature has always had an important piece in our way of living and doing," said Wolfram Sparber, head of renewable energy at Eurac, one of the main occupants of Noi. "The idea was to offer a place with a high work value, a nice place to be, a good combination of work-life balance."

Sparber shows off a lab where scientists spend days in large, fridge-like rooms to test equipment and human response to extreme weather on mountain peaks as high as 9,000 metres.