Even so, snow responds to a warming planet in different ways.
“A warmer atmosphere is also an atmosphere that can hold more water,” said Alex Gottlieb, a graduate student at Dartmouth College and lead author on [the new study in the journal Nature](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06794-y). That can increase precipitation, spurring snow, or even extreme storms and blizzards that offset the effect of snowmelt amid warmer temperatures.
That has made it harder for scientists to calculate how snowpack has changed over time. But the new findings reveal that areas of the United States and Europe are nearing a tipping point where they could face a disastrous loss of snow for decades to come.
“Once you pass this threshold, which we refer to as the snow loss cliff … with even modest amounts of warming you can get these really accelerating losses,” Gottlieb said.
***Cutting through noisy data***
When Gottlieb and his co-author Dartmouth Geography Professor Justin Mankin began looking into this, they were surprised by how inconclusive previous analyses had been. A recent [U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-i/) had not assessed snow mass loss in the Northern Hemisphere, or globally.
The researchers said snow mass is hard to measure, making it difficult to link it to human-caused climate change.
There is a lot of variability, and because there are so many different methods researchers use to look at snowpack, estimates don’t necessarily agree with one another.
To get around that problem, the Dartmouth researchers compiled every data set of snowpack they could find in order to identify where they agreed with one another. They looked at snowpack levels from 1981 to 2020 in March in order to capture all the variation in the preceding winter’s weather — from one-off snow storms to midwinter melts.
Then they used modeling to look at what snow levels would be with or without greenhouse gas emissions.
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[Snow is piling up](https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/01/09/winter-storm-blizzards-floods-travel-impact/?itid=lk_inline_manual_2) across much of the United States this week, but new research shows this is the exception rather than the rule: Seasonal snow levels in the Northern Hemisphere have dwindled over the past 40 years due to climate change.
Even so, snow responds to a warming planet in different ways.
“A warmer atmosphere is also an atmosphere that can hold more water,” said Alex Gottlieb, a graduate student at Dartmouth College and lead author on [the new study in the journal Nature](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06794-y). That can increase precipitation, spurring snow, or even extreme storms and blizzards that offset the effect of snowmelt amid warmer temperatures.
That has made it harder for scientists to calculate how snowpack has changed over time. But the new findings reveal that areas of the United States and Europe are nearing a tipping point where they could face a disastrous loss of snow for decades to come.
“Once you pass this threshold, which we refer to as the snow loss cliff … with even modest amounts of warming you can get these really accelerating losses,” Gottlieb said.
***Cutting through noisy data***
When Gottlieb and his co-author Dartmouth Geography Professor Justin Mankin began looking into this, they were surprised by how inconclusive previous analyses had been. A recent [U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-i/) had not assessed snow mass loss in the Northern Hemisphere, or globally.
The researchers said snow mass is hard to measure, making it difficult to link it to human-caused climate change.
There is a lot of variability, and because there are so many different methods researchers use to look at snowpack, estimates don’t necessarily agree with one another.
To get around that problem, the Dartmouth researchers compiled every data set of snowpack they could find in order to identify where they agreed with one another. They looked at snowpack levels from 1981 to 2020 in March in order to capture all the variation in the preceding winter’s weather — from one-off snow storms to midwinter melts.
Then they used modeling to look at what snow levels would be with or without greenhouse gas emissions.
**Read the full story here, and skip the paywall with email registration:** [**https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/01/10/winter-snowpack-northern-hemisphere-climate/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com**](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/01/10/winter-snowpack-northern-hemisphere-climate/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com)