Bare slopes, December rain, and snow plows that barely had reason to move made for troubling conditions across Greater Yellowstone, and new research suggests those signs of a snow drought were not just ordinary variability.
Scientists found that human-caused climate change directly led to the West's extreme snow drought, according to WyoFile.
Here's what to know
Researchers from Montana, Colorado, and Wyoming determined that warming caused by fossil fuel use made a snow drought this severe in the West more than four times as likely.
The team's findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that the effect was even stronger in the Upper Colorado River Basin, where climate change made the extreme snow drought 14 times more likely.
They reached those estimates by using a detailed dataset produced with the National Science Foundation's NCAR supercomputer to compare today's conditions with a preindustrial climate.
Marianne Cowherd, a snow scientist at Montana State University, said repeated questions from people trying to understand what they were witnessing firsthand helped inspire the study.
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"People around me would ask if the snow was so bad because of climate change, and I would find myself having to answer, 'Probably?'" Cowherd commented.
"But I don't really know for sure."
More background
In the Mountain West, snowpack acts as a natural reservoir, holding water during winter and releasing it gradually as temperatures warm.
That system becomes less reliable for communities, farms, and ecosystems when snowfall drops and runoff arrives earlier in the year.
Cowherd said attribution research is about more than observing that a warm year produced less snow.
"We're actually building a good guess of what the world would have been like if there were no climate change, and that's how we do the actual attribution," she explained.
The study estimated that an event like this would have occurred about once every 30 years under preindustrial conditions, compared with every 6.8 years in today's climate.
The effects can spread far beyond mountain snowfields. Warmer temperatures and reduced snowpack can lengthen wildfire seasons, worsen large fires, disrupt agriculture, and increase pressure on wildlife.
Those risks are especially significant in Greater Yellowstone.
Wolverines rely on robust snowpack for denning, while warming can interfere with the seasonal plant growth patterns that elk and pronghorn depend on.
What's being done?
One use for the research could be better planning.
Cowherd indicated that she wants land managers to apply the findings as they prepare for warming that has already taken place.
The study also highlights a broader response: reducing the emissions that drive warming.
Carbon dioxide and methane are still among the main forces behind rising temperatures, and cutting those pollutants would reduce the odds of future winters with severe snow loss.
"This is a negative impact of anthropogenic climate change, and that is difficult to hear, difficult to learn, but it also means that it's within our control to a certain degree," Cowherd remarked.
"If we pursue these lower emission scenarios … we would expect years like this to happen less frequently," she added.
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