Zhang Tao/Xinhua/Getty ImagesĮxtreme cold snaps: Why temperatures still plummet to dangerous levels even as the planet warms This aerial photo taken on Janushows an early morning view of Beiji Village in Mohe, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. Without it, more sunlight is absorbed by the ground, warming the atmosphere. The white of snow acts like a car’s sun shade, deflecting sunlight and its heat back to space. The sun is more direct there compared to the higher latitudes, especially during spring and fall when it still snows. The downward trend is particularly notable in the Northern Hemisphere’s mid-latitudes - the middle area north of the tropics and south of the Arctic, where the US and much of the world’s population resides. There has already been a 2.7% decline in annual global snowfall since 1973, according to Brettschneider’s analysis of data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. “It means we can expect a lot of the places that haven’t exhibited massive snowfall declines to maybe start to exhibit them with just a little bit more warming,” Mankin told CNN. Instead, there is more of a tipping point, which would mean that once a certain temperature threshold is reached, “we should expect the losses to accelerate.” Snow also isn’t going to decline linearly, or at a 1-to-1 rate, with rising temperatures, said Justin Mankin, a climate scientist and associate professor of geography at Dartmouth College. “You can get away with things for a little bit, and it can hide some trends, but overall the laws of thermodynamics will win out.” “Eventually the laws of thermodynamics mean that as you keep warming you’re just going to transition more and more of that snow over to rain,” said Brian Brettschneider, a climate scientist with the National Weather Service in Alaska and the brains behind the data analysis in this story. It’s possible in the near term that climate change will cause more extreme winter storms and some years of increased snowfall - like the data shows for the Northeast US - but as global temperature warms, there will be fewer of those years, and eventually we could see snowfall amounts fall off a cliff. Snowfall is declining globally as temperatures warm because of human-caused climate change, a new analysis and maps from a NOAA climate scientist show.īut less snow falling from the sky isn’t as innocuous as just having to shovel less it threatens to reinforce warming, and disrupt food and water for billions of people.Ĭlimate scientists say the future of snowfall is pretty clear: A warmer world driven by human pollution means precipitation is more likely to fall as rain than snow, all else being equal.
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