Iain Cameron
Lead author of the Royal Meteorological Society’s snow patches report
Becoming fascinated by snow as a young boy, Iain started observing snow patches professionally in 2005, gathering data for the Royal Meteorological Society’s annual report on Scottish snow patches. The report was started by the exceptional mountain polymath, Dr Adam Watson, who passed on the lead authorship in 2011. Today, few people know more about Scotland’s snow and its history.
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“When Dr Adam Watson first started recording snow patches in the 1930s, he spoke to gamekeepers and stalkers, who had spoken to keepers and stalkers before them and those before them. So although the evidence is only anecdotal, we’re pretty confident that, from at least the 1700s until the early 1900s, snow was ever-present in the Cairngorms. “That fits with what we know of the Little Ice Age, when the climate was undoubtedly cooler and there was more snow around in general. 1933 was a seminal year, when all snow in Scotland disappeared by the end of September. The Scottish Mountaineering Club observed this, and wrote to The Times about it. That was the first time snow had completely disappeared in Scotland and nobody thought that they would ever see such a thing again. But it disappeared again entirely in 1959 and then again in 1996, 2003, 2006 and 2017.
“Even though some snow survived in 2018, it was only a tiny piece and there was none in the Cairngorms. In 2019, again only one tiny piece survived. I visited it in late October during a blizzard and dug down through the fresh snow to find the old, which was no bigger than a dinner table.
“I’m not a climatologist or academic, all I do is record the data and others can interpret it how they see fit. But you can see there is an increase in the rate of disappearance, even over the last 10-15 years. It’s disappeared four times since 1996, having only done so twice in the previous 300. In 2015 we had an exceptional year, when 73 snow patches survived. We do get these unusual years from time-to-time and that might characterise winters in the future.”