Sentences with phrase «snowpack in»

Ingram acknowledged that the so - called «elephant in the room» is climate change and said numerous computer data show California becoming warmer and drier in decades to come, reducing the snowpack in the mountains.

«Soot hasn't been widely measured in snowpack, and it's hard to accurately simulate snowpack in global models.

The hydroelectric resource potential depends on a combination of rainwater draining directly into waterways and the level of accumulated snowpack in mountainous regions that eventually melts and becomes run - off.

However, using an American example, a decade of increasingly greater reduction of snowpack in the Rockies will translate into enormous costs to the US Southwest and particularly economies of Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson and Southern California.

The average snowpack in the Cascades has declined 50 percent since 1950 and will be cut in half again in 30 years if we don't start addressing the problems of climate change now.

But it would take an extended sequence of cool, wet winters to meaningfully replenish depleted groundwater aquifers, improve upon the truly abysmal Sierra Nevada snowpack in recent winters, and alleviate some of the long - term ecosystem impacts of California's ongoing record «hot drought.»

The Arctic is not alone in this unprecedented melting; the life - supporting snowpack in the Himalayas is also feeling the impact.

Snowpack in April of 2016 was much more substantial than it is now.

Consider California's April snowpack in 1977 was 25 percent of normal compared to 5 percent in 2015.

Complete deforestation of the Amazon rainforest could reduce rainfall in the Pacific Northwest by up to 20 percent and snowpack in the Sierra Nevada by up to 50 percent, suggests...

Snowpack in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, which provides water for power generation, was down as much as 50 percent in some areas in spring, McCorkle said.

Not to be outdone, snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains was almost nonexistent for much of 2013 - 2014, and at least one of California's major rivers is no longer reaching the Pacific Ocean.

[3] Mote, Philip W. «Climate - Driven Variability and Trends in Mountain Snowpack in Western North America.»

As the climate of the Pacific Northwest warms, more winter precipitation is falling as rain, compared with historical averages.2 With declining snowpack in Oregon's Cascade Mountains, peak stream flows are occurring earlier, and summer flows are declining.2 These changes are expected to continue as heat - trapping emissions grow, putting more stress on already endangered salmon that return to the Columbia and other rivers in the region to spawn.2

The depth and breadth of the seasonal snowpack in any given year depends on whether a winter is wet or dry.

That change is going to be an issue for people out West because a lot of people depend on water from the snowpack in the mountains.

The document mentions the flow of the Colorado River diminishing, water shortages in the Southwest becoming more acute, and less winter snowpack in the Rockies.

Visualizing the Highs and Lows of the Lake Mead Reservoir Snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Irrigation at Todhia Arable Farm in Saudi Arabia Water vapor in afternoon clouds over the Amazon Permafrost on the northern Siberian Coast Olympic Mountains Experiment (OLYMPEX) 2015: Olympic Efforts to Measure Olympic Mountain Snow

In 2015, far below - average snowpack in California and the Pacific Northwest created exceptionally dry conditions across the West, and the region experienced fires of a size rarely seen.

The magnitude of observed declines in snowpack in the Southwest, in the range of 20 %, is similar to the increases in runoff associated with thinning from this study, suggesting that accelerated thinning may at least offset or ameliorate runoff losses due to climate change.

Studies have found that warmer temperatures in recent decades help explain a downward trend in snowpack in the western United States, even after patterns of natural climate variability have been considered [9], [56].

«We went after snowpack in the western U.S. because it provides about 60 to 80 percent of the water input in high elevation mountains.»

The implications are important, since climate studies indicate the snowpack in mid-elevation forests in the Western United States and other similar forests around the world has been decreasing in the past 50 years because of regional warming.

The winter snowpack in mountainous regions such as the Himalayas, the Rockies, the Sierra, and the Andes is a most efficient reservoir, storing water through the cold months and releasing it gradually as snowmelt in warm months when farmers need it.

While a low snowpack in the mountains is undesirable, the low snowpack in eastern North Dakota does have a bright side as there are no concerns of spring flooding in the Red River Valley at this time.

The lack of snowpack in 2014 is all about ENSO and resulting jet stream patterns, something well known for years.»

Declining mountain snowpack in western North America.

Fires in the West, droughts in the Southwest, melting snowpack in the Northwest, flooding and heavy rainfall in the Northeast, the much stronger coastal storms and hurricanes that we've seen in the Gulf: we've gotten to the point where we can all point to something that's happening and say: «This is what climate change is doing to our region.»

Meanwhile, Southern California almost burns up, Atlanta doesn't have water, the snowpack in California is non-existent leading to water wars for the rest of this decade at least, and the United States has no coherent energy policy whatsover.

More snowpack in the East Arctic?

April 10, 2017 • While the deep snowpack in California's mountains is easing drought concerns, there are still people in the state's rural Central Valley who don't have water running from their taps.

As such, it is a good time to take inventory of the snowpack in the mountains.

The majority of winter precipitation in Montana falls as snow, and the precipitation that accumulates as snowpack in the mountains is the most significant source of water to valley bottoms throughout the summer.

Snowpack in the Sierra Nevada was just slightly above normal at month's end.

Because of a drought in California, the snowpack in the Rocky Mountains in 2015 (right) was much, much less than one year earlier (left).

Both empirical studies and model projections demonstrate that snowpack in the Northern Rockies and inland Pacific Northwest is more vulnerable to warming than some other regions in the West.

The average snowpack in the Cascades has declined 50 percent since 1950 and will be cut in half again in 30 years if we don't start addressing the problems of climate change now.

It needs to be clarified here, that it is hypothetically possible to get more snowfall and snowpack in a globally warming world (at least for a while), due to increased precipitation (which is predicted in a warming world, esp for the higher latitudes) coming down as snow.

And the GPS data is about 50 percent more accurate than one hydrologic model used to estimate snowpack in the Sierra Nevada and roughly on par with another one, Argus said.

Warmer global temperatures will lead to shallower snowpack in many mountainous areas, says Keith Musselman, a hydrologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

Californians, on the other hand, should be watching the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada.

«Water managers and state and federal agencies can make decisions about whether cloud seeding is a viable option to add additional water to supplies from snowpack in the mountains.»

But for the past 30 years or so, snowpack in both regions has shrunk.

Researchers have evaluated different mechanisms that could account for declining snowpack in a warming world: earlier onset of snowmelt, a change in melt rates and shifts from snow to rain under certain conditions.

Snowpack in the northern Rocky Mountains has shrunk at an unusually rapid pace during the past 30 years, according to a new study.

«That part is not new, but they point out a few other occasions in the last millennium where there has been low snowpack in the West were also periods that were unusually warm.

This time, no return to cooler period Tim Barnett, a climatologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said the new results appear to agree with his earlier work that used climate models to show humans» greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to declining snowpack in the western United States.

Five times as much dust now falls on the snowpack in the Colorado Rockies as when the area was first heavily settled in the mid-19th century.

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

Changes in flow patterns of warm Pacific Ocean air from the south were driving earlier spring snowmelt, while decreasing summer sea ice had the greatest influence on later onset of snowpack in the fall.