Evaluating a prediction system for snow management Pirmin Philipp Ebner1, Franziska Koch2, Valentina Premier3, Carlo Marin3, Florian Hanzer4,5, Carlo Maria Carmagnola6,11, Hugues François7, Daniel Günther4, Fabiano Monti8, Olivier Hargoaa9, Ulrich Strasser4, Samuel Morin6, and Michael Lehning1,10 1WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, Davos, Switzerland 2Institute for Hydrology and Water Management, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), Vienna, Austria 3Institute for Earth Observation, EURAC, Bolzano, Italy 4Department of Geography, University of Innsbruck, Austria 5Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change, University of Graz, Austria 6University of Grenoble Alpes, Université de Toulouse, Météo-France, CNRS, CNRM, Centre d’Etudes de la Neige, 38000 Grenoble, France 7University of Grenoble Alpes, Irstea, LESSEM, Grenoble, France 8ALPsolut S. r. l., Livigno, Italy 9SnowSat, Grenoble, France 10School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland 11Dianeige, Meylan, France Correspondence: Michael Lehning (
[email protected]) and Franziska Koch (
[email protected]) Abstract. The evaluation of snowpack models capable of accounting for snow management in ski resorts is a major step towards acceptance of such models in supporting the daily decision-making process of snow production managers. In the frame of the EU H2020 project PROSNOW, a service to enable real-time optimisation of grooming and snow-making in ski resorts was developed. We applied snow management strategies integrated in the snowpack simulations of AMUNDSEN, Crocus 5 and SNOWPACK/Alpine3D for nine PROSNOW ski resorts located in the European Alps. We assessed the performance of the snow simulations for five winter seasons (2015-2020) using both, ground-based data (GNSS measured snow depth) and space-borne snow maps derived from snow maps (Copernicus Sentinel-2).