It looks like someone has come along with a paintbrush and a pot of paint. The jagged peaks of the Southern Alps splashed haphazardly with white, dripping down the valleys between. The rounded schist ranges of Central Otago painted more precisely, with thick white icing covering their smooth summits.
It doesn’t bear thinking about that this wonderful, widespread transformation in the coldest half of the year might become a thing of the past. The changing climate is inexorably gnawing away at all the weather and the landscapes we hold dear, some transformations happening more rapidly than others.
Earth Sciences New Zealand this week reported an "abysmal" winter snow season for parts of the southern mountains, including some skifields. Slopes around Wānaka in particular have had a lack of snow.
This won’t come as much of a surprise to many of us after another warmer-than-average winter and a lack of subantarctic blasts. There have been a few decent cold fronts, but not as many as experienced in winters in past decades.
Ironically but typically, September has begun in far stormier, snowier and unsettled mode than the winter. Amidst all the hoopla celebrating the arrival of spring, September and October are traditional the most changeable months, and in recent years have brought some heavy snowfalls to low levels.
While the malign influence of climate change is already being felt across New Zealand, it is important to realise that winter snow on our mountains is not going to disappear overnight. Our continued exposure to polar outbreaks and the height of our ranges mean some snow is likely at high altitude for centuries to come.
The complexities of the atmosphere and the Earth’s marine and terrestrial cycles mean there will be climate change effects we can barely imagine. We cannot simply say warmer weather will melt all the snow. A few outcomes of these twists and turns may even be positive.
There is little doubt, though, the average snowline will rise throughout this century. So while there might still be thick snow on the summits, areas hundreds of metres below which used to be snow-covered for months may only experience a few weeks of cover instead, with major implications on their environments and ecosystems, and on what happens downstream.
The survey of this winter’s snow by Earth Sciences NZ provides a pretty grim picture for us to mull. While some spots had near-average amounts of snow, there were many with low and even record-low falls. Albert Burn only had 76cm of snow, compared with its average of 1.62m; Mt Larkins, near Queenstown, with an average of 3.1m, recorded 2.22m.
It was a pattern repeated northwards throughout the Alps, meaning a curtailed or non-event of a ski season, except for the upper Rakaia valley.
The lack of snow is a major concern, not only for tourism but also more broadly for other parts of the economy.
Hydro-electric generation in the South Island depends on snow melt making its way from the rivers into the lakes, on average contributing about half of all inflows. Water from the same source is also crucial in some irrigation systems used by farms growing crops during the spring and early summer.
The scientists say the amount of snow shows a clear waning trend in the past few decades. However, there will still be natural variations in the number of polar outbreaks in the years ahead and some winter seasons will be snowier than others.
There are also likely to be climatic curveballs, like the one just reported by climate researchers showing the melting of sea ice in the Arctic has actually slowed significantly in the past 20 years, perhaps due to variations in ocean currents.
But, even with these odd "wins", we have to listen to, learn from and act on what the land is telling us.
