Changing snow patterns have far-reaching consequences, from water shortages to shuttered ski resorts. A new study confirms that human-caused climate change has affected snow patterns across the Northern Hemisphere, including clear declines of snowpack in at least 31 individual river basins.
What’s more, the researchers found that when a region warms to an average temperature of 17 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 8 degrees Celsius, over the whole winter, it appears to reach a tipping point that snow starts to melt away quickly.
“Beyond that threshold, we kind of see everybody go off a cliff,” said Justin Mankin, a professor of geography at Dartmouth College and co-author of the study, which was published on Wednesday in Nature.
Declines in snowpack, the total mass of snow on the ground, have serious implications for places that depend on spring snow melt as a water source.
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