Seasonably Warm

It’s almost a crime to complain about the long parade of cloudless, sunny, 55-degree days as Santa Fe rolls into December, but the inconvenient culprit behind the idyllic weather is well known.

While the souring of Earth’s atmosphere fueled wildfires to the west and hurricanes to the east this summer, part of New Mexico’s reckoning with climate change comes in the form of warmer winters—and with them a cascade of issues for an industry that relies on snow.

A stretch of get-me-outside-right-now days in the early winter aren’t prima facie evidence of climate change but, for Tommy Long, Ski Santa Fe’s operations manager, hotter winters mean the beginning of the season often relies on man-made snow.

“Mother Nature provides, kind of, what she can provide, and we do our best to supplement it with the snowmaking,” Long tells SFR.

Thankfully for Ski Santa Fe, the weather cooperated this year, staying below freezing long enough to produce enough snow for the opening day of the 2021-22 season on Nov. 25, with five runs on the mountain suitable for shredding.

The ski area installed a $2.2 million water tank in 2015 to store some of the millions of gallons of water the state engineer allows the resort to divert. Some years, the resort uses more or less of that water to make snow. Long tells SFR the expenses for making snow—such as labor and fuel—have increased, which in turn has contributed to higher lift ticket prices in recent years.

Over in Los Alamos, another Long, with almost six decades of experience in New Mexico’s ski industry, says there’s been a shift in how resorts manage snow since he first started working at Sandia Peak Ski Area in 1966.

Tom Long, Tommy’s father and general manager of Pajarito Mountain Ski Area, says warmer winters are reflected in how many New Mexico ski areas rely on snow making.

That’d be all of them, the elder Long says.

We “spend a lot of time craning our neck at the heavens and you try to look at weather patterns, and what’s going on, and if it’s an El Niño or La Niña [year],” he says. And ultimately “we can do our part to help mitigate issues with the weather, but the weather is what it is.”

Both Longs explain that some winters are better than others, and they’re keeping their fingers crossed for colder months ahead.

But one especially cold, or warm, winter shouldn’t distract from the larger picture of warming seasons the ski industry faces.

New Mexico State Climatologist David DuBois says the trend isn’t new and doesn’t show any signs of reversing.

“Since right around 1970 we’ve seen an upward trend, in pretty much all the areas in New Mexico, of warming temperatures,” DuBois tells SFR. He adds that the average increase in temperature ranges from 0.5 to 0.8 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.

According to data compiled by Climate Center, an environmental research organization, the average winter temperature in the Albuquerque and Santa Fe region increased by three degrees in the last 50 years.

This warming, tied to the billions of metric tons of energy capturing carbon dioxide and methane released into the atmosphere each year, reflects just a portion of the consequences climate change brings to New Mexico, explains DuBois.

As the atmosphere warms, precipitation falls more often as rain, instead of snow, says DuBois—an effect observed both in early winter and the spring. One implication, he explains, is an earlier “melt out,” when water flows out of the mountains prematurely.

Also with the higher temperatures, additional evaporation moves the water into the atmosphere, DuBois says. That’s not what New Mexico needs. “We want it to stay in the ground and travel down the streams so that we can use it in acequias and store it in reservoirs and eventually for agriculture, for ecosystems,” DuBois says.

Another indicator of New Mexico’s shifting climate is the number of winter days above “normal” temperatures. Albuquerque and Santa Fe’s last winter season had 12 more days when weather was warmer than that average, based on data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Centers for Environmental Information.

DuBois explains that total precipitation for the region isn’t changing significantly, but the increases in temperature have the biggest impact on snowpack and surface water supplies.

A winter sports enthusiast, DuBois says the impact of climate change on northern New Mexico’s winters will force industries like ski resorts to adapt.

“How do we still maintain, you know, our lifestyle and cultures and all the great stuff that we have in New Mexico with a changing...scenario for the winters?” DuBois says. The challenge is also an opportunity to “figure out new things and change the way we have done things in the past.”

The elder Long says one adaptation he’s observed in the ski industry is snow farming.

“Because snow is the lifeblood of a ski area,” Long says, “ski areas all over have a pretty aggressive program to take care of it: move it, to farm it, to fluff it up and to condition it.”

In New Mexico, Long explains, everyone is a good snow farmer. When he started in the ski industry, before the warming trend noted by DuBois, there was some grooming and moving of snow to take care of it, “but man, it’s gotten way more sophisticated with the type of equipment we use now to groom the snow,” says Long.

Using snow fencing and snowcats, Long says, resorts solidify their snowpack, taking the air out to reduce how much melting occurs.

The younger Long adds that ski areas model the practices of agriculturalists in another way: “Like farmers keep an eye on the rain, we keep an eye on the weather very closely.”

His team at Ski Santa Fe uses weather stations on site that gather data to look ahead to best predict the weather.

“As of right now it looks like this trend is kind of holding,” he says. “It continues to look like it’s gonna be fairly warm and dry.”