Exploring EC-Earth snow climatology and future projections in high elevation areas

Snow cover plays a key role in high-altitude environments, and changes in the snow spatial/temporal distribution and thickness affect energy, radiation and water budgets at the Earth's surface. In particular, a reduction in the snow amount has a direct effect on the availability and seasonal distribution of water resources. This is especially true in high altitude areas such as the Alps and the Hindu-Kush Karakoram Himalaya (HKKH) region. In this work, we consider the EC-Earth snow depth dataset and investigate its ability to reproduce the snow climatology over the Alps and the HKKH region. We compare EC-Earth historical simulations to the existing ERA40 and ERA-Interim reanalysis used as an approximation to the real conditions and we relate the results to the observed data. After exploring the average snow characteristic in the last decades, we analyze the effects of climate change in the Alps and the HKKH region by using the available future snow projections in different climate change scenarios.