Recent fluctuations of meteorological and snow conditions in Japanese mountains

Abstarct Meteorological data from mountainous areas of Japan have been collected by the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED) for almost 20 years. The collected long-period data indicate that neither a notable increase in mean winter temperature nor a reduction in snow depth has occurred in these areas. The maximum snow depth, SD max , and maximum snow water equivalent, SWE max , show similar fluctuation trends, although with large year-to-year variations in value and a larger fluctuation range for SWE max than for SD max . This result suggests that monitoring of only SD max in mountainous areas is not sufficient for understanding the quantitative fluctuation of water resources originating from snow. The SD max fluctuation trends in mountainous areas sometimes differ from those in flatland areas because mountain SD max depends more on winter precipitation than on mean winter air temperature, whereas the opposite is true for flatlands. In addition, the dependence ratio of SD max on fluctuations in winter precipitation changes with altitude because the distributions of precipitation with air temperature change with altitude.