Read the latest news from the Joint Body on the Status of Mountain Snow Cover!
The Joint Body on the Status of Mountain Snow Cover (JB-SMSC) is an initiative sponsored by the International Association of Cryospheric Sciences (IACS), the Mountain Research Initiative (MRI), and the WMO Global Cryosphere Watch (GCW). The currently defined project duration is from 2022 to 2025, but its legacy will be much longer, bringing together more than 120 snow experts and establishing closer links between many researchers and institutions. While the tasks of the Joint Body are organized by a project-like structure, the implementation of the tasks depends strongly on volunteer work or synergies from already running projects, as the JB is only funded by seed money.
The given financial structure of the JB-SMSC results in tasks and groups with different activities. Currently, the more active groups within the JB-SMSC deal with in-situ data of snow depth, snow water equivalent (SWE) and depth of snowfall. These data sets are brought together and used for global analysis including comparison and complementation with remote sensing and climate reanalysis data. Regarding in-situ data, the JB-SMSC is continuously collecting meta information of in-situ measurements (see here for the current status) and welcomes any further contributions with snow data, especially for regions not yet (well) covered.
The metadata was analyzed with a student project in 2024 and presented at EGU24. Furthermore, a PhD student at University of Graz, who started end of 2024, will collect/compile and analyze the time series of snow depth and SWE in cooperation with involved JB-SMSC partners. Finally, JB-SMSC members also co-supervised a master’s thesis at the University of Trento, which studied northern hemisphere snow climatologies and trends based on an existing data set, thus laying the foundation for future global-scale analyses. On the remote sensing and reanalysis side, the JB members focused on extracting information from MODIS and ERA5L for the GMBA mountain delineation, resulting in interactive maps of 2024 snow anomalies (see here and here).
The JB’s main mission to connect snow experts has been mainly through participation in conferences and with dedicated side meetings at the IMC2022, IUGG2023, EGU24, EGU25, but also at other meetings, such as the WMO Snow Watch Team or the ESA Snow CCI User Workshop. Finally, some results can be found on here. In addition, the JB-SMSC recently co-hosted a session at EGU 2025.
Contacts:
Dr. Wolfgang Schöner: wolfgang.schoener(at)uni-graz.at
Dr. Michael Matiu: michael.matiu(at)unitn.it
Photo by Imre Tömösvári on Unsplash.
