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WATER RESOURCES

Implications of losing snowpack

Nature Climate Change volume 10, pages 388–390 (2020)Cite this article

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Snow in the mountains provides a natural reservoir, storing water in the cold season for use later in the year. Now research demonstrates that reduced mountain snowpack due to rising temperatures makes drought harder to predict and jeopardizes irrigated agriculture throughout the world.

Climate change will decrease both the amount of snow that falls and the timing of when it melts, thus shifting when rivers and streams have more water to earlier in the year. These trends have been investigated by the scientific community for the past two decades1, with studies providing mounting evidence that these shifts are happening and are projected to increase2. However, although the connection between higher temperatures and less snow is clear, implications of these changes for water systems throughout the world are still being uncovered. Writing in Nature Climate Change, two author teams independently investigate implications of snowpack decline: Yue Qin and colleagues3 show how snow-loss-driven changes in seasonal water supply increase risks for irrigated agriculture worldwide, and Ben Livneh and Andrew Badger4 demonstrate how reductions in snowpack make it more difficult to predict seasonal drought in the western US.

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Fig. 1: How snow changes seasonal water supply in rivers.

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  1. Aspen Global Change Institute, Basalt, CO, USA

    Julie A. Vano

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  1. Julie A. Vano
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Correspondence to Julie A. Vano.

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Vano, J.A. Implications of losing snowpack. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 388–390 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0769-1

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