Himalayas bare and rocky after reduced winter snowfall, scientists warn

Much less winter snow is falling on the Himalayas, leaving the mountains bare and rocky in many parts of the region in a season when they should be snow-clad, meteorologists have said.

They say most winters in the last five years have seen a drop compared to average snowfall between 1980 and 2020.

Rising temperature also means what little snow falls melts very quickly and some lower-elevation areas are also seeing more rain and less snow, which is at least in part due to global warming, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other scientific reports.

Studies have also shown there is now what is known as “snow drought” during winter in many parts of the Himalayan region.

Accelerated melting of glaciers in the wake of global warming has long been a major crisis facing India’s Himalayan states and other countries in the region. This dwindling snowfall during winter is making matters worse, experts have told the BBC.

They say that the reduction in ice and snow will not only change how the Himalayas look, it will also impact the lives of hundreds of millions of people and many ecosystems in the region.

As temperatures rise in spring, snow accumulated during winter melts and the runoff feeds river systems. This snowmelt is a crucial source for the region’s rivers and streams, supplying water for drinking, irrigation and hydropower.

Apart from impacting the water supply, less winter precipitation – rainfall in the lowlands and snowfall on the mountains – also means the region risks being gutted by forest fires due to dry conditions, experts said.

They add that vanishing glaciers and declining snowfall destabilise mountains as they lose the ice and snow that act as cement to keep them intact. Disasters like rockfalls, landslides, glacial lakes bursting out and devastating debris flows are already becoming more common.

So, how serious is the drop in snowfall?

The Indian Meteorological Department recorded no precipitation – rainfall and snowfall – in almost all of northern India in December.

The weather department says there is a high possibility that many parts of northwest India, including Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh states, and the federally-administered territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, will see 86% less than long period average (LPA) rainfall and snowfall between January and March.

LPA is the rainfall or snow recorded over a region over 30 to 50 years and use its average to classify current weather as normal, excess or deficient.

According to the weather department, north India’s LPA rainfall between 1971 and 2020 was 184.3 millimetre.

Meteorologists say the sharp drop in precipitation is not just a one-off thing.

“There is now strong evidence across different datasets that winter precipitation in the Himalayas is indeed decreasing,” said Kieran Hunt, principal research fellow in tropical meteorology at University of Reading in the UK.

A study Hunt co-authored and published in 2025 has included four different datasets between 1980 and 2021, and they all show a decrease in precipitation in the western and part of the central Himalayas.

Using datasets from ERA-5 (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Reanalysis), Hemant Singh, a research fellow with the Indian Institute of Technology in Jammu, says snowfall in the north western Himalayas has decreased by 25% in the past five years compared to 40-year long-term average (1980-2020).

Meteorologists say Nepal, within which the central Himalayas is situated, is also seeing a significant drop in winter precipitation.

“Nepal has seen zero rainfall since October, and it seems the rest of this winter will remain largely dry. This has been the case more or less in all the winters in the last five years,” says Binod Pokharel, associate professor of meteorology at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu.

Meteorologists, however, also add that there have been heavy snowfalls during some winters in recent years, but these have been isolated, extreme events rather than the evenly distributed precipitation of past winters.