Mount Fuji Sets Record for Latest Time in the Year Without Snow

Mount Fuji remains snowless in late October, the latest in the year that the famous mountain has gone without snow for at least 130 years, when records began.

In recent years, at least a light snowfall on Mount Fuji is common by early October, but this year has seen record-breaking hot months over the summer and unseasonably warm temperatures into September.

According to a press release from Tokyo Climate Center (TCC) and Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), July 2024 reached record-breaking heat, even surpassing heat records reached in July 2023. June and August also had record-high temps, with temperatures reaching about 1.76 degrees Celsius (3.1 degrees Fahrenheit) above average, the BBC reported.

While temperatures did begin dropping this month, they still remained above average for October. As such, Mount Fuji remains snowless with just a couple days until November.

This is the latest into the year that the mountain has gone without a snowfall since scientists began tracking this data in 1894.

Previously, the record latest in the year that Mount Fuji hit before having snowfall was October 26, which happened in 2016 as well as in 1955, according to Yutaka Katsuta, a forecaster at Kofu Local Meteorological Office. Katsuta noted that climate change could be playing a role in the delayed snow cover, as reported by The Guardian.

“Temperatures were high this summer, and these high temperatures continued into September, deterring cold air,” Katsuta told Agence France-Presse.

According to TCC and JMA, the extreme heat was linked to the subtropical jet stream moving toward Japan, which allowed warmer air to flow in the region, even into the upper troposphere. The organizations’ report also noted extremely high sea surface temperatures, the El Niño event that ended in spring and other factors that led to these higher temperatures as well as heavy summer rainfall in northern Japan.

“The joint research team in Advanced Studies of Climate Change Projection at Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) conducted a preliminary assessment using event attribution to evaluate the effects of global warming on these extreme events,” the report stated. “The findings indicated that the high temperatures observed would not have occurred in the absence of global warming, which may also have contributed to the heavy rainfall events.”

As confirmed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 2023 was the hottest year on record. Last year, snowfall first reached Mount Fuji on October 5. Yet experts predict that 2024 will surpass records broken in 2023, since the global average temperature was over 1.63 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial average for 12 consecutive months as of May 2024. The late snowfall for Mount Fuji in 2024 could be another sign of a record-breaking year in terms of heat.