Boffin's think-bubbles save our snow

THIS is snow joke. A scientist has found a way of prolonging the notoriously fickle Scottish ski season - by wrapping mountains in bubble wrap.

Despite two bumper winters with plentiful snowfall, the country's five ski resorts suffer badly when temperatures rise and melt the snow and high winds drive the white stuff off the pistes, leaving extensive bare patches.

Salvation may now be at hand thanks to Professor John McClatchey, who has experimented on preserving snow cover with sheets of bubble wrap. He has found that ordinary bubble wrap stops snow melting as quickly and prevents it from being blown away - and that painting the material silver to reflect sunlight works even better.

Ski resort managers said they would now consider deploying bubble wrap in key areas where receding snow was hampering plans to keep the runs open for business. Although the Cairngorm ski resort remains open in the run-up to Easter, several key lifts have had to be closed down because of patchy snow cover. The other four resorts are already closed to skiers.

McClatchey, who works for the University of the Highland and Island's Environmental Research Institute, began work following a study of snowfall patterns on Cairn Gorm, which showed that the ski centre on its slopes had lost an average of two days' skiing a year over the last 30 years as snow disappeared due to milder winters. The other centres at Nevis Range, Glencoe, Glenshee and The Lecht have had similar losses.

But McClatchey believes it may be possible to arrest the loss of snow from patches of the mountain long enough to allow resorts to extend the season for at least one or two lucrative weekends of business.

McClatchey said: "The last two years buck the general trend, which shows that we have been losing a couple of days' skiing per year on average.

"If that trend continues, there will come a point when it may become uneconomic (to operate ski centres]."

As part of an EU-funded project on climate change, he found that it was not just the mild temperatures that were to blame, but that the combination of wind and temperature had a greater effect on snow loss in Scotland than in other countries, where wind is less of a factor.

He said: "I was able to show that wind speed plays a significant role in the melt. It means, in future, if the weather is warmer and windier the snow will disappear faster."

To counter the loss, he experimented with small sheets of clear plastic bubble wrap with its edges buried in the snow, and also with wrap spray-painted silver to insulate patches against the sun's rays.

The tests on Cairn Gorm last year showed more than 49cm of uncovered snow was lost over five days, or 9.9cm a day.A single cover of bubble wrap reduced that to 20cm (4cm a day) and a double cover reduced it to 17cm (3.6cm a day). The silver-painted wrap reduced this further to 15cm (3.2cm a day) - or 12cm (2.4cm a day) with a double wrapping.

McClatchey said: "The differences are quite staggering. Clearly if you cover the snow it can slow down the loss. What it means is there is the potential to protect the ski slope to retain the snow. You cannot cover the whole mountain, but ski slopes on Cairn Gorm and in other places tend to thin out at certain points over the whole run.

"So you could cover over vulnerable points for a week and that could potentially extend the skiing season by another weekend or maybe two, and two weekends would be worth a lot of money."

Colin Kirkwood, the marketing executive at Cairngorm Mountain, said: "It is possible it could work and we could see it being used on areas which are prone to getting worn away towards the end of the season or, for example, at the bottom of a tow track or on the lower part of a piste where it joins the foot of the uplift.

"It is the combination of strong winds and rising temperatures which tends to strip away our snow so something like this would need to be very secure and we would need to be confident that more snow was not forecast before laying it down."

Heather Negus, the marketing manager at the Nevis Range centre and chairwoman of the industry body, Ski Scotland, said: "There are certain key areas on the hill which lose snow quicker than others and during the winter we work hard to keep these areas skiable for as long as possible.

"We're always interested in new and innovate solutions that would help us retain snowpack for longer, especially a solution that would work on an exposed mountain where the winds can reach over 70 mph."