Reanalysis of 44 Yr of Climate in the French Alps (1958-2002): Methodology, Model Validation, Climatology, and Trends for Air Temperature and Precipitation

Abstract Since the early 1990s, Meteo-France has used an automatic system combining three numerical models to simulate meteorological parameters, snow cover stratification, and avalanche risk at various altitudes, aspects, and slopes for a number of mountainous regions in France. Given the lack of sufficient directly observed long-term snow data, this “SAFRAN”–Crocus–“MEPRA” (SCM) model chain, usually applied to operational avalanche forecasting, has been used to carry out and validate retrospective snow and weather climate analyses for the 1958–2002 period. The SAFRAN 2-m air temperature and precipitation climatology shows that the climate of the French Alps is temperate and is mainly determined by atmospheric westerly flow conditions. Vertical profiles of temperature and precipitation averaged over the whole period for altitudes up to 3000 m MSL show a relatively linear variation with altitude for different mountain areas with no constraint of that kind imposed by the analysis scheme itself. Over the ob...

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