Warm weather threatens Italy’s ski season

The highest temperatures in 130 years are threatening Italy’s ski season, while heavy rain is due to hit runs in the French Alps in the coming days.

Italy’s northern region of Piedmont has recorded its warmest December since the 1890s on the back of the country’s hottest autumn in centuries, forcing some winter resorts to shut runs because of a lack of snow.

Bardonecchia, a resort popular with families near the French border, has been badly affected by a high-pressure weather system that led to temperatures as high as 16C during December.

“During this period last year, we had four more (slopes) open,” Enrico Rossi, director of Colomion, a ski lift company and vice-president of the Bardonecchia tourism consortium, told newspaper Corriere della Sera.

The forced closures came amid unseasonably balmy weather across the region. Turin registered 21.6C on Dec 22, with temperatures rising above 25C in towns elsewhere in Piedmont.

Meanwhile, in France, heavy rain delayed the opening of the ski season in Morzine and Les Gets, with temperatures slightly above average.

Despite some light snowfall in the French Alps in recent days, further rain is forecast to wash it away.

Luca Mercalli, president of the Italian Meteorological Society, said global warming was to blame for the dramatic rise in temperatures and warned of a bleak outlook for Alpine regions.

“The lack of snow in the Alps this December does not surprise me as we have been observing a decreasing trend in the quantity and duration of the snow cover for 30 years,” Mr Mercalli told The Daily Telegraph.

“In the days before Christmas, to find zero degrees celsius you had to go up to almost 3,000 metres [9,900ft] and these are temperatures we normally find in late summer,” he added.