Sentences with phrase «caused snowpack»

Recently observed heat and precipitation patterns in California have also caused snowpack to melt earlier, depriving ecosystems of a valuable source of moisture as summer temperatures dry out the landscape.

The findings could serve as a warning sign that engineers need to design stronger structures, especially as glide avalanches may become more frequent: Warmer winters in the future may cause snowpacks to become, on average, wetter and denser than those seen in winters of recent decades.

Surprisingly, cloudy, gray and humid winter days can actually cause the snowpack to warm faster, increasing the likelihood of melt during winter months when the snowpack should be growing, the authors report.

Not exact matches

The reasons for this are many: less cold water from Sierra snowpack, less cold freshwater being released from the Delta due to farming needs and other water policies, warm waters caused by El Nino flowing into the Bay, and other variables.

The excessive heat increased the rate of water loss by evaporation and caused precipitation to shift from snow to rain, leaving a meager snowpack and parched reservoirs.

«This extreme variability is increasingly imprinted on these freshwater, terrestrial, and marine systems, and this has caused them to become more synchronous with one another with a number of implications for fisheries, drought, snowpack, and tree growth.»

«Increased runoff caused by dust on snowpack acts as a major leak in the reservoir system,» says Thomas Painter, a professor of geography at the University of Utah.

But dust from the Sahara also blows up onto the snowpack in the Alps, causing early melting.

And dust begets more dust: It reduces the reflectance of the winter snowpack and increases the absorption of sunlight, causing snow to melt sooner.

It wasn't a shallow snowpack that caused tonnes of snow to roar into Longyearbyen on 19 December 2015, however.

Water managers are warning that soaring temperatures are also causing the region's already stressed snowpack to melt faster.

Snowpacks continue to melt causing thousands to be displaced, dozens of local states of emergency

«While this may not sound like much, it has been enough to reduce winter snowpack, cause earlier snowmelt, and lengthen the summer drought.»

A succession of high - snowpack years or operational decisions to transfer water storage from Lake Powell to Lake Mead could also result in large releases of clear water that typically cause sandbar erosion; indeed, such releases occurred from 1996 to 2000 [Mueller et al., 2014] and in 2011.

California's average snowpack had reached 186 % of normal for March 1st, well above levels that caused its 1983 floods (DWR 2017b).

Local climate in the North Cascades influences mean snowpack depth and ablation rate, but does not cause significantly different responses to annual climate conditions within specific elevation bands.

A new study reveales that the record low snowpack levels in the western-most region of the continental U.S. last 2015 were most likely caused by high temperature.

It wasn't one or two particularly heavy atmospheric river storms that pulled California out of a drought, increased snowpack and caused flooding.

Species that live downslope will also be hurt by changes on mountaintops; the Sierra Nevada mountain yellow - legged frog, for example, depends on runoff from snowpack year - round to support its three - to four - year life stage as a tadpole, and earlier spring snowmelt runoff caused by global warming may leave this hardy, once - abundant creature high and dry in the summertime.

This snowpack accumulation near the poles, which gets its water via the Arctic and Antarctic oceans, that in turn rob it from equatorial latitudes of our oceans, also results in a reduction in the earth's spin axis moment of inertia and causes the spin rate to increase as evidenced in the recent history of the rate at which Leap Seconds are added to our calendar (see Wysmuller's Toucan Equation for more on this evidence that during this warm time with much greater polar humidity, earlier seasonal, later seasonal and heavier snows are beginning to move water vapor from the oceans to the poles to re-build the polar ice caps and lead us into a global cooling, while man - made CO2 continues to increase http://www.colderside.com/faq.htm).

Gregory T. Pederson et al., Regional patterns and proximal causes of the recent snowpack decline in the Rocky Mountains, US, Geophysical Research Letters, vol.

As climate change shrinks mountain snowpack and causes more intense floods and droughts, our work to protect the Northwest's rivers and fresh water is more important than ever.

[4] Thanks to a strong El Niño that brought near average precipitation to the northern California, the statewide April 1 snowpack measurement in 2016 showed state water resources at 87 percent of the long - term average; however, the snowpack was not sufficient to undo water deficits caused by years of drought.

Warmer temperatures are causing mountain snowpack, on which so much of the life in the region depends, to melt earlier in most years, he said.

Just one year later another relatively light snowpack again caused adults to emerge early.

So it seems quite clear that there is a potential connection, in a statistical sense, between human - caused global warming, declining Arctic sea ice, and the anomalous blocking pattern this winter that has added to other factors we know are tied to human - caused climate change (warmer temperatures and increased soil evaporation, and decreased winter snowpack and freshwater runoff) to produce the unprecedented drought this year in California.

Because of this feedback loop, in a snowpack that has partially melted, it is not possible to distinguish whether elevated impurity concentrations caused enhanced melting or resulted from enhanced melting (or both).

Some in the media are making a big deal out of the fact that the Sierra Nevada snowpack is above normal for the month, and they're pointing to the historically strong El Niño weather condition as the cause.

If it deepens [develops even lower pressure] over a decade or two — and it's done this in the past and will in the future — it's that situation that can cause this enhanced snowpack loss.

It not only verifies that the snowpack has declined already in many areas of the West over the past three decades but also concludes that this decline was caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

• The melting of an above - average snowpack across the northern Rocky Mountains, combined with abnormally high precipitation, caused the Missouri and Souris rivers to swell beyond their banks across the upper Midwest.