Global warming hitting Northwest hard, researchers warn
To find the most compelling evidence to date that global warming could shrink damp Cascade snows by half in coming decades, Seattle scientists first took a step back in time.
They picked through a half-century of snow data from Arizona to British Columbia to better grasp how an atmospheric stew of greenhouse gases may shape our region for years to come.
Their conclusion: Their earlier warnings about future water shortages in the Northwest were more accurate - perhaps even understated.
"If you think the water fights we have now are intense... you ain't seen nothing yet," University of Washington professor Ed Miles said yesterday during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Miles said the moisture in snow that nourishes the West and gives life to its network of rivers has been steadily declining since at least World War II.
And the hardest-hit region has been the Cascades, where battles to provide enough water for fish, agriculture and power have been worsening for years.
Across the West, winter snows pile up in the mountains, forming the foundation for water supplies that eventually spill as spring runoff into rivers. Since the Dust Bowl of the early 20th century, federal agriculture officials each April have taken snow-moisture samples in the mountains to gauge when and how they should release water for fish, hydropower and farms through dams and storage reservoirs.
Yesterday, Miles, who leads UW's Climate Impacts Group - one of the country's leading climate-change research bodies - told a panel of experts that included the British government's top science adviser that his team reviewed temperature records, precipitation records and data from 50 years of snow-water surveys at 800 stations across the West.
The result: A minute rise in global temperatures just since 1950 already has reduced mountain snows across 75 percent of the West.
Continue reading this story from the Seattle Times:
Global warming hitting Northwest hard, researchers warn