Snow Production in Todays Changing Climate

“Snow Production in Todays Changing Climate” is a thesis to explore artificial snow production options. Methods for forecasting weather, including: moving average, weighted moving average, exponential smoothing, regression, are evaluated to explore weathers relevance to operations of snow production, maintenance of snow, reuse of precipitation and snowmelt, solar energy for snow production. Snow production choices are explored all through the lens of minimizing costs with consideration to environmental friendliness. Concepts of cost benefit analysis and breakeven point is used in the method for snow gun choice between three options, Portable Air Water Gun, Standard Low Energy Air Water Gun, and Portable Fan Gun, as well as for the choice of snow farming practices and reservoir building. Linear and exponential regressions are used for optimization in terms of cost and savings functions. The amount of fuel, electricity, or water, saved from usage of resources discussed in this study is an indication to the amount by which a resort could impact various environmental foot prints, whilst being conductive to cost minimization of operations.