The storm is pummeling much of the northern United States, a welcome relief for some areas that have seen little snow in recent months.
A late start to winter until early January limited ski resort operations and raised early concerns about water supplies for the summer.
“We’re playing catch-up now,” said Dan McEvoy, a regional climatologist at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada.
About 800 monitoring stations track snowfall across the West. More than 90% of those stations reported measurements below the median. Mr McEvoy said it was perfect for this time of year. It’s not unusual for parts of the West to be below seasonal averages, but it’s unusual for so many areas to be below them at once.
In Western states, the size of the snowpack affects how much water farmers can use, how severe the wildfire season is, and how much electricity hydroelectric dams can generate. Climate scientists predict that as the climate warms, snowpack will decrease, further threatening already tight supplies in much of the West.
Scientists have struggled to quantify the impact of climate change on snowpack, but the results of the study were published Wednesday. Published in Nature magazine They found that climate change is the cause of the decreasing trend in snowfall.
“Our analysis reveals that many of the world’s most populated basins lie on cliffs of rapid snowfall,” the authors write.
Previous studies have shown that snowfall is decreasing. Quantifying snow cover (the amount of water stored as snow) is more difficult because it varies significantly from year to year and is difficult to measure. In some cases, the atmosphere warms and can hold more water, leading to more snowfall or more extreme events.
“Snow is a very bad canary for a coal mine,” said Justin Mankin, an author of the Nature paper and a climatologist at Dartmouth College, who continued the study because the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change did not cooperate. . We were able to talk clearly about how the overall snowpack had changed.
For the study, Mankin and Dartmouth Earth System Scientist Alexander Gottlieb analyzed snowpack in 169 river basins in the Northern Hemisphere. They identified clear snowpack trends in 82 of these basins and sharp declines in the snowpack that supplies water to populated areas. Researchers were able to confirm that human influence, or global warming, is causing changes in 31 watersheds.
Their research suggests that many watersheds in the Northern Hemisphere are nearing rapid loss, with the potential to rebuild water supplies for more than 2 billion people.
“When snow falls off a cliff, it accelerates and falls off the cliff,” Mankin said. “We are fundamentally unprepared.”
In most parts of the country, winter has just begun. On January 1st, after a mild December, snow fell on just 20% of the continental United States. Based on satellite analysis of the National Operational Hydrological Remote Sensing Center. The recent storm surge has increased by about 45% as of Wednesday.
McEvoy said a ridge of high pressure blocked moisture in December, leaving areas in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains with dry conditions. Snow fell in parts of the Midwest, including Chicago, Minneapolis, and the Dakotas.
“Normally in late December we have snow on the ground. We really didn’t have any,” McEvoy said of those cities, adding that some parts of the Midwest saw average monthly temperatures in December that were below normal in degrees Fahrenheit. He pointed out that the temperature was 10 to 15 degrees higher.
Meanwhile, warmer temperatures and several storms in the Pacific Northwest hindered snowpack development. Rain wiped out the snow after the storm in the Northeast.
Recent storms have put 164 million people in the United States under weather warnings, and the situation will improve, not ease.
“From what we’ve seen so far, it doesn’t look like a pattern that will completely eliminate the snow drought,” McEvoy said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center predicts a warm and dry winter for most northern states, due in part to strong El Niño conditions. El Niño is a naturally occurring pattern associated with warm ocean temperatures in the Pacific Ocean that slow trade winds. .
“El Niño is a double whammy, with warmer waters from the Pacific Ocean adding more heat and energy to the atmosphere as a result of warming due to climate change,” McEvoy said. “This combination allows us to have a warm year ahead.”
Source: www.nbcnews.com
