The Vanishing Winter: Manali and the Himalayan Snow Deficit

Residents in Manali have been telling me the snow is not what it was. The meteorological record, the ICIMOD satellite data and the apple trees all agree with them.

Local observation, when it spans a generation, is rarely wrong. The people telling me in Manali that winters have thinned are describing a signal that three independent data systems have already confirmed: IMD's precipitation record, ICIMOD's cryosphere monitoring, and two decades of peer-reviewed agronomy from Himachal's apple belt. The question is no longer whether the snow is declining. It is how fast, at what elevations, and what the downstream adjustment looks like.

Three mechanisms are compounding. The first is direct thermal. The western Himalayas have warmed faster than the global average for at least four decades. In Kullu and Shimla, studies from the Y.S. Parmar Horticulture University record a rise of 1.8 to 4.1 degrees Celsius in mean temperature over the past two decades. At the elevation band where Manali (2,050 m), Shimla, Mussoorie and Nainital all sit, between 1,500 and 3,000 metres, precipitation that would once have fallen as snow now falls increasingly as rain.

The second is atmospheric. Winter precipitation in the western Himalayas arrives not with the monsoon but through western disturbances, extra-tropical storms originating over the Mediterranean and tracking east across Iran and Afghanistan. These systems are structurally weakening. Mediterranean warming has reduced their moisture-carrying capacity. Shifts in the subtropical jet stream have altered their tracks. In December 2025, eight western disturbances crossed northern India against a normal of six, per IMD Dehradun, yet delivered little precipitation. Professor Muhammad Sultan Bhat of the University of Kashmir puts it plainly: the quantum of snowfall has declined significantly, while a larger share of precipitation is now falling as rain instead of snow.

The third is localised and underestimated in most India climate discourse: black carbon deposition. Clean snow reflects up to 80 percent of incoming solar radiation. Soot-dusted snow, from vehicular emissions, biomass burning and construction dust, absorbs far more heat. It shortens the season at both ends and accelerates glacier melt. Himachal's Chief Minister explicitly flagged this in his February 2026 statement on the state climate action plan. Black carbon is a short-lived climate pollutant with very high regional leverage, and India's CCTS currently does not account for it.

The scale of the 2025-26 deficit is not confined to Himachal. It spans every state in the western Himalayan arc. The pattern is regional, not local.

Water security is the first-order consequence, and it does not stop at Himachal's borders. Seasonal snow contributes roughly 25 percent of the runoff in the twelve major river basins originating in the Hindu Kush Himalaya, which together support nearly two billion people. For the Beas at Pandoh Dam, snow and glacier melt supply about 35 percent of annual flow, per hydrological modelling published in the Hydrological Sciences Journal. For the upper Indus, the figure reaches 72 percent. When the snowpack fails, the reservoir has no substitute.

The danger is not only volume but timing. Glaciers and snowpack function as slow-release storage. They accept precipitation in winter and release it steadily through the dry summer months, precisely when downstream agriculture needs it. Early or erratic melt breaks that synchrony. The hydrological pulse arrives in March instead of May, and by the time 600 million downstream farmers require it, the flow has already passed.

The apple data is the clearest proof that this is a multi-decade structural shift, not a single bad winter. It has largely stayed inside agricultural journals and outside the climate policy conversation.

Apples require between 1,000 and 1,600 chilling hours at or below 7 degrees Celsius to break dormancy and fruit properly. Agrometeorological studies from the Journal of Agrometeorology document an annual snowfall decline of 36.8 mm across Himachal's apple belt and a measurable reduction in chill unit hours at all elevations up to 2,400 metres. The apple belt has physically migrated uphill over three decades. It is a climate-change indicator written into the landscape.

Traditional apple-growing areas in Kullu and Shimla have recorded yield declines of 25 to 40 percent. Orchardist income in these districts fell 27 percent relative to 1995, per Rana et al. in the Journal of Agrometeorology. Lahaul-Spiti, a cold desert across the Rohtang Pass that grew no apples a generation ago, is now a commercially viable apple district. Over four lakh families depend on apple farming in Himachal, contributing roughly 13 percent of state GDP. The upward migration runs out of mountain at some point.

The second underreported signal is wildlife. Uttarakhand recorded anomalously high forest fire activity in October to December 2025, detected by NASA's VIIRS satellite, correlating with the precipitation deficit. Himalayan black bears, which depend on late-autumn foraging before winter denning, are delaying hibernation. Bear attacks on humans have surged in Chamoli and other Uttarakhand districts as bears descend to lower, human-populated elevations in search of food. The Gaddi pastoralists of Himachal report shorter grazing seasons. The Bakarwals and Gujjars report drying springs along their migration routes. The ecology is rearranging itself faster than the policy apparatus is tracking.

The third: glacier mass balance. Snow is a glacier's annual deposit. Without reliable winter accumulation, glaciers enter a negative mass balance regime from which they do not recover at human timescales. The Parbati glacier in the Beas basin is in retreat. The Gangotri glacier is losing 22 to 27 metres of length per year. As glaciers retreat, they leave unstable moraine dams impounding meltwater, creating the conditions for glacial lake outburst floods. Depleted winter snow is the slow story; GLOF events are the fast one. Both are being written simultaneously.

ICIMOD's Director General, Pema Gyamtsho, framed the trajectory with a precision that is uncomfortable to read. Carbon emissions, he said at the April 2025 launch, have already locked in an irreversible course of recurrent snow anomalies in the Hindu Kush Himalaya. Mitigation remains necessary, particularly on non-CO2 pollutants like methane and black carbon where regional leverage is highest. The near-term adjustment is adaptation: stronger high-elevation monitoring, seasonal water storage, crop diversification away from high-chill varieties, and transboundary cooperation on water management.

For Manali specifically, the signals are unambiguous. The town sits at the elevation band where warming has most aggressively converted snow into rain. Higher reaches around Solang, Rohtang and into Lahaul-Spiti will continue to receive snow, with increasing variability. The valley floor will not, at least not at the volume or duration of living memory. Residents and investors should not be asking whether the snow comes back. They should be asking what a Himalayan hill town looks like, economically and ecologically, when its winter identity no longer matches its climate.