Regions of intensification of extreme snowfall under future warming

Abstract

Due to climate change the frequency and character of precipitation are changing as the hydrological cycle intensifies. With regards to snowfall, global warming has two opposing influences; increasing humidity enables intense snowfall, whereas higher temperatures decrease the likelihood of snowfall. Here we show an intensification of extreme snowfall across large areas of the Northern Hemisphere under future warming. This is robust across an ensemble of global climate models when they are bias-corrected with observational data. While mean daily snowfall decreases, both the 99th and the 99.9th percentiles of daily snowfall increase in many regions in the next decades, especially for Northern America and Asia. Additionally, the average intensity of snowfall events exceeding these percentiles as experienced historically increases in many regions. This is likely to pose a challenge to municipalities in mid to high latitudes. Overall, extreme snowfall events are likely to become an increasingly important impact of climate change in the next decades, even if they will become rarer, but not necessarily less intense, in the second half of the century.

Warming drives poleward range contractions of Beringian endemic plant species at high latitudes

“…Warming‐driven increases in precipitation have been observed and predicted for many places in the high latitudes (e.g. Bintanja & Selten, 2014; Liu et al, 2012; Quante et al, 2021; Stewart, 2009; Zhang et al, 2021), and according to the GCMs used in this study, mean winter precipitation (mostly as snowfall at high latitudes—see Stewart, 2009), one of the influential variables in our models, is expected to increase >70% by the middle of the century. Increases in winter precipitation may be expected to offset moisture deficit arising from growing season warming.…”

Changing Nature of High‐Impact Snowfall Events in Eastern North America

“…Prior studies on extreme snowfall changes over eastern North America have primarily relied on output from GCMs (H. Chen et al, 2020;Danco et al, 2016;Janoski et al, 2018;Notaro et al, 2014;O'Gorman, 2014;Quante et al, 2021;Zarzycki, 2018). Some authors applied statistical downscaling and bias correction techniques (Notaro et al, 2014;Quante et al, 2021) to address the challenges posed by the relatively coarse (≥50 km) horizontal grid spacing of these simulations. Except for Zarzycki (2018) and Janoski et al (2018), these studies also partitioned precipitation into rain and snow based on simple surface air temperature thresholds (e.g., 0°C).…”

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