Author(s):
Anne W. Nolin - Oregon State University
Abstract:
One of the most visible and widely felt impacts of climate change is the change (mostly loss) of low elevation snowcover in the midlatitudes. Snowcover that accumulates at temperatures close to the ice-water phase transition is at greater risk to climate warming than cold climate snowpacks because it affects both precipitation phase and ablation rates. Changes in such climatologically sensitive snowpacks can impact hydropower generation, reservoir storage, rain-on-snow floods, and winter recreation.
Based on a climatologically based global snow cover classification (Sturm et al., 1995) “at risk” snow is defined as a ephemeral and lower elevation maritime and alpine snow classes. This original classification was produced globally at 0.5 degree resolution and used monthly means of temperature and precipitation as well as vegetation cover to map snow climates. In this work, the classification is updated for the Pacific Northwest region using fields of temperature and precipitation from PRISM as well as MODIS-derived global maps of vegetation cover. This new classification has significantly improved grid resolution (500m) and is able to clearly identify regions of ephemeral and lower elevation maritime and alpine snow that are thought to be at risk in a climate warming scenario.
