Response of snow-dependent hydrologic extremes to continued global warming

Noah S. Diffenbaugh, Martin Scherer, Moetasim Ashfaq

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

137 Scopus citations

Abstract

Snow accumulation is critical for water availability in the Northern Hemisphere, raising concern that global warming could have important impacts on natural and human systems in snow-dependent regions. Although regional hydrologic changes have been observed (for example, refs,), the time of emergence of extreme changes in snow accumulation and melt remains a key unknown for assessing climate-change impacts. We find that the CMIP5 global climate model ensemble exhibits an imminent shift towards low snow years in the Northern Hemisphere, with areas of western North America, northeastern Europe and the Greater Himalaya showing the strongest emergence during the near-term decades and at 2C global warming. The occurrence of extremely low snow years becomes widespread by the late twenty-first century, as do the occurrences of extremely high early-season snowmelt and runoff (implying increasing flood risk), and extremely low late-season snowmelt and runoff (implying increasing water stress). Our results suggest that many snow-dependent regions of the Northern Hemisphere are likely to experience increasing stress from low snow years within the next three decades, and from extreme changes in snow-dominated water resources if global warming exceeds 2C above the pre-industrial baseline.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)379-384
Number of pages6
JournalNature Climate Change
Volume3
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2013

Funding

Support for data storage and analysis was provided by the Center for Computational Earth and Environmental Sciences in the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford University. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modelling groups (listed in Supplementary Table S1) for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP the US Department of Energy’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. We thank the National Snow and Ice Data Center for providing the SWE data. Our work was supported by NSF award 0955283 and NIH award 1R01AI090159-01 to N.S.D., and ORNL LDRD 32112413 and DOE award ERKP777 to M.A.

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