Co-Designing the SnowApp Climate Service for Winter Tourism Industry in Northern Finland Ilona METTIÄINEN a,1 , Martin COATH a , Roxana CONTRERAS a , Jusu TOIVONEN b and John C. MOORE a a Arctic Centre, University of Lapland b Rukakeskus Ltd. Abstract. Snowmaking and snow storing are increasingly used as climate adaptation strategies in ski resorts all over the world, including in the Arctic. While the decrease of the number of snow cover days is slower than in the Alps, snow security is decreasing particularly at the beginning of the skiing season in October- November. As there is up to 30-times difference between minimum and optimal conditions in the energy and water consumption in snowmaking, it makes sense to optimize the timing of snowmaking to ensure that snowmaking will not turn into maladaptation. Climate services are user-friendly ways of providing relevant climate information for end-users. Our team co-designed a climate service prototype for winter tourism centers in Northern Finland in 2017-2020 by a transdisciplinary co-design process involving climate science, modelling, tourism research, and practitioners including snowmaking professionals and environmental experts from a pilot enterprise. The versatile co-design methods utilized included e.g. visual methods and workshops, and co-evaluation of the prototype. The resulting climate service prototype SnowApp provides a reliable 4-week forecast on snowmaking conditions and hence it is a decision-support tool for ski resort management. The prototype is applicable in other geographical locations, too, and for other snow dependent businesses. Keywords. Climate change adaptation, winter tourism, co-design, climate services, transdisciplinary engineering Introduction Proper, reliable snow conditions are the key success factor for winter tourism destinations [1, 2]. However, climate change poses challenges to winter tourism in ski resorts across the world [1, 3–6], increasingly also in the Nordic Countries and in the Arctic. While the mean annual snow cover duration in the Arctic and Northern Scandinavia is currently 6 months or more [7], the Arctic is warming 2-4 times faster than the global average, which already influences the snow conditions in the region [7, 8]. Expected future changes include further delay of the first snowfall and onset of winter conditions, more rain-on-snow events, and the decrease of the number of cold days – in essence, shorter and warmer winters and less reliable snow conditions [7, 9, 10]. Snowmaking and storing of snow over the summer have become central adaptation strategies in ski resorts for improving snow security and enabling longer ski seasons – or for enabling economically viable ski operations to continue [4, 5, 11, 12]. Due to their 1 Corresponding Author, Email: ilona.mettiainen@ulapland.fi. Engineering For Social Change A. Cooper et al. (Eds.) © 2024 The Authors. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). doi:10.3233/ATDE240839 22