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Response of snow-dependent hydrologic extremes to continued global warming

Nature Climate Change volume 3, pages 379–384 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

Snow accumulation is critical for water availability in the Northern Hemisphere1,2, raising concern that global warming could have important impacts on natural and human systems in snow-dependent regions1,3. Although regional hydrologic changes have been observed (for example, refs 1, 3, 4, 5), the time of emergence of extreme changes in snow accumulation and melt remains a key unknown for assessing climate-change impacts3,6,7. 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 2 °C 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 2 °C above the pre-industrial baseline.

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Figure 1: Comparison of model realizations in the baseline and late-twenty-first-century periods.
Figure 2: Emergence of low and extremely low snow years in the twenty-first century.
Figure 3: Emergence of extreme precipitation, melt and runoff years in the twenty-first century.

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Acknowledgements

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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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Earth System Science and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, 473 Via Ortega Stanford, California 94305-4216, USA

    Noah S. Diffenbaugh & Martin Scherer

  2. Climate Change Science Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, One Bethel Valley Road, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831-6301, USA

    Moetasim Ashfaq

Authors
  1. Noah S. Diffenbaugh
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Contributions

N.S.D. designed the climate model analysis, performed the climate model analysis and wrote the paper. M.S. designed the climate model analysis and performed the climate model analysis. M.A. designed the climate model analysis and wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Noah S. Diffenbaugh.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Diffenbaugh, N., Scherer, M. & Ashfaq, M. Response of snow-dependent hydrologic extremes to continued global warming. Nature Clim Change 3, 379–384 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1732

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