Autumn snow drought on Mount Damavand

« We are currently experiencing the driest autumn the country has experienced in 50 years » said Iran’s meteorological organisation. Near Tehran, Mount Damavand, the highest peak in Iran (5609 m) was reported to be « unusually bare of snow ».

I checked this statement using my MODIS snow cover data processing algorithm implemented in Google Earth Engine (Gascoin et al. 2022).

The data confirm that the snow cover area around Mount Damavand was well below the normal since September 2025. The snow cover area was nearly zero until mid November when finally a snowfall occurred! However, it probably fell only a few centimeters of snow. On 19 November 2025, a Sentinel-2 image shows that the snow cover was already gone on the south facing slope of Mount Damavand and the snow line elevation was near 3500 m in the north facing shaded areas.

Let’s hope that more snow will come soon to alleviate the unprecedented drought that Iran is currently facing.

Photo header credit: Safa.daneshvar, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons