New study says climate change behind drop in Northern Hemisphere snowpack

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New study says climate change behind drop in Northern Hemisphere snowpack


The snow-covered summit of Mount Aeneas is visible above a ribbon of low clouds on Wednesday, Dec. 13. (Casey Kreider/Daily Inter Lake)

By BLAIR MILLER Daily Montanan
| February 2, 2024 12:00 AM

New scientific research published earlier this month shows that human-caused climate change is putting the most densely populated areas of the Northern Hemisphere, including the American West, at risk of losing vast portions of their water supply because of decreasing snowpack.

Published in the journal Nature on Jan. 10, the report led by two Dartmouth College researchers found climate change-driven snowpack trends in half of the 169 river basins in the Northern Hemisphere, 31 of which they said they could “confidently attribute to human influence.”

“Together, our findings portend serious water-availability challenges in basins where snowmelt runoff constitutes a major component of the water supply portfolio,” the researchers wrote in their conclusion. “Improving our understanding of where and how climate change has and will affect snow water resources is vital to informing the difficult water resource management decisions that a less snowy future will require.”

The researchers built a model that analyzed observations and models of snowpack, temperature, precipitation, and runoff data from 1981 through 2020, then used the uncertainties from the models and observations to try to cut through temperature and precipitation variations and account for regional differences to see how a warmer planet would affect snowpack and runoff in the future.

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