Abstract
There is general consensus that projected warming will cause earlier snowmelt, but how snowmelt rates will respond to climate change is poorly known. We present snowpack observations from western North America illustrating that shallower snowpack melts earlier, and at lower rates, than deeper, later-lying snow-cover. The observations provide the context for a hypothesis of slower snowmelt in a warmer world. We test this hypothesis using climate model simulations for both a control time period and re-run with a future climate scenario, and find that the fraction of meltwater volume produced at high snowmelt rates is greatly reduced in a warmer climate. The reduction is caused by a contraction of the snowmelt season to a time of lower available energy, reducing by as much as 64% the snow-covered area exposed to energy sufficient to drive high snowmelt rates. These results have unresolved implications on soil moisture deficits, vegetation stress, and streamflow declines.
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Acknowledgements
The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. K.N.M. was supported under an NCAR Advanced Study Program (ASP) Postdoctoral Fellowship. We acknowledge high-performance computing support from Yellowstone (ark:/85065/d7wd3xhc) provided by NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, sponsored by the National Science Foundation. We thank N. Addor for thoughtful discussion and M. Barlage for his critical effort to improve the snow simulations.
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K.N.M. and M.P.C. designed the study; K.N.M. conducted all analyses; C.L. ran the WRF simulations; K.I. managed the WRF output; K.N.M., M.P.C. and R.R. contributed to the interpretations of the results; and K.N.M. and M.P.C. wrote the paper.
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Musselman, K., Clark, M., Liu, C. et al. Slower snowmelt in a warmer world. Nature Clim Change 7, 214–219 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3225
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3225
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