Possible relationships are studied between changes in major climate parameters (air and soil surface temperature, precipitation, and specific and relative humidity) and in regime characteristics of snow cover (duration of occurrence of snow cover and of stable snow cover, dates of their appearance and disappearance), with emphasis on Georgia.Climate stability or variability is determined by energy transformation in the Sun-atmosphere-Earth system. In the process of radiation energy transformation in the Earth's atmosphere and at the surface, an energetic state of the system is formed, which governs stability or variability of climate. Changes in different parameters of climate are different. As a result, inhomogeneous changes in the parameters of climate can decisively affect the estimation of climate changes and their causes.The paper is aimed at determining relationships between variability of snow cover regime and major physical parameters of the atmosphere on a scale of a small region (Georgia), in which nearly all possible varieties of climate are presented.As noted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [2], the term "climate change" denotes statistically significant variations of the mean state or of its variability that are persistent for a decade or longer. The present paper is based on observations at 50 sites distributed as homogeneously as possible in Georgia; the observation period exceeds 40 years . The following main physical parameters are considered as characteristics of climate changes: air and soil surface temperature, precipitation amount, and specific and relative humidity. The parameters of snow cover regime are the duration of occurrence of snow cover and stable snow cover, dates of their appearance and disappearance are taken.It is known that snow cover lasts for several months of the year. Variations of dates of its appearance are caused by atmospheric conditions before the event. In this connection, it is of interest to determine an optimum period before the snow cover appearance, when the snow cover parameters and state of the atmosphere are most closely connected. This relationship evidently exists, and its derivation can be helpful for climatic forecasting of the future winter weather. It is also interesting to derive a relationship between the regime of snow cover and atmospheric state after snow melting.In order to test the above-mentioned relationships, correlation matrices were calculated between soil surface temperatures averaged over different time periods before the appearance or after melting of the snow cover and the parameters characterizing the snow cover regime. The soil surface temperature was taken because it exhibits the highest correlation, as compared with other climatic characteristics, with the snow cover parameters. In Table 1, some correlation coefficients from the calculated matrices are presented.The correlation coefficients in Table 1 are not high; however, they show an indicative feature. Relationship between the snow cover parameters and soil surfac...
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