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Palaeoclimatology

The woods fill up with snow

Nature volume 440, pages 1120–1121 (2006)Cite this article

Palaeoclimatological evidence covering the past millennium suggests that the global water cycle has changed in the past century. Agreement with climate models points to human activity as the main cause.

Two principal uncertainties in predicting climate change are the net effect of water in the climate system and the way in which water will be redistributed over the surface of the planet1. On page 1179 of this issue, Treydte et al.2 present a reconstruction of precipitation in central Asia for 826–1998 AD, developed from tree-ring data. Their results reveal a striking increase in snowfall over the past century compared with that over the previous millennium. This picture and other observations from around the world are concurring with predictions made by climate models, suggesting that the most pertinent aspects of the water cycle are adequately represented in the models. Furthermore, it seems that recent changes in precipitation patterns probably exceed the range of natural variability estimated for the past several hundred to one thousand years.

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Figure 1: Distribution of water in the climate system.
Figure 2: Twentieth-century trends in palaeo-estimates of precipitation from around the world.

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  1. Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona, 105 West Stadium, Tucson, 85721, Arizona, USA

    Michael N. Evans

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  1. Michael N. Evans
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Evans, M. The woods fill up with snow. Nature 440, 1120–1121 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/4401120a

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