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Forecast for the West: Less Snow, More Floods

February 01, 2008 05:37 PM ET | Ben Harder | Permanent Link

Firefighters work against fast-moving wildfires in the hills of the Santa Clarita Valley, a community an hour's drive north-east of Los Angeles. 10/22/2007

(David Butow/Redux for USN&WR)

By 2040, scientists predicted yesterday, the Sierras and Colorado Rockies will shed most of their snowpack by the beginning of April each year. With average temperatures rising across the region, more precipitation will fall as rain and less as snow, and what snow does fall will melt earlier than it has in the past.

The consequences could be diverse. Here are a few of the elements:

Water. Rivers, swollen with rain and snowmelt during the winter and spring, will flow at unusually high levels. Unless reservoirs and other water supply infrastructure get updated to expand their capacity, they could become more susceptible to flooding, the researchers say.

Earth. Floods aren't the only threat. Early snowmelt also leads to months of low water flow later in the year, so the soil is more likely to get parched. Limited water supplies could hurt farmers and set up conflicts between agricultural areas, thirsty cities, and ecosystems that depend on brimming rivers and streams.

Fire. Forest fires are also projected to increase in the western United States. As the ground dries out, so does fuel for forest fires, including trees, undergrowth, and dead plant matter. That has already led to more large fires in the western United States, although an expert has told me it was not necessarily behind the major wildfires in Southern California last year.

Tags: environment | global warming | weather | wildfires | floods

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Reader Comments

Snowpack well above normal

More snow has fallen this winter than in recent years. Snowpack in the Cascades and Rockies is considerably over average. This article is speculative at best.

RD of WA
Feb 04, 2008 14:29:27 PM [permalink] [report comment]

Snowpack well above normal

UN Global Warming Forecast Violates Accepted Principles according to

NCPA Study Reveals Forecasting Flaws That Make Conclusions Unreliable. This would preclude the article's assumed accuracy.

DALLAS (February 1, 2008) - Predictions of melting ice caps, catastrophic sea level rise and severe floods and droughts are the result of a United Nation's report that violates nearly half of accepted forecasting principles, according to a new study published by the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA). Consequently, the UN report is an unreliable tool for determining future public policy.

"These dire predictions are not the result of scientific forecasting," said J. Scott Armstrong, an internationally known expert in forecasting methods from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania who co-authored the NCPA study. "Rather, they are opinions derived from a political process."

The most accepted forecasting methods were determined by internationally-known experts and expert reviewers and are available in the Principles of Forecasting handbook. These principles were designed to be applicable to making forecasts about diverse physical, social and economic phenomena. The NCPA study applied these forecasting principles to audit 2007's Fourth Assessment Report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which predicted big increases in average world temperature by 2100. The audit found that:

Out of 140 forecasting principles, 127 are relevant to the procedures used to arrive at the climate projections in the IPCC report;

Of these, the IPCC report clearly violated almost half (60);

An additional 12 forecasting principles appear to be violated, and there is insufficient information in the report to assess the use of 38 others; therefore

Only 17 out of 127 applicable forecasting principles can be shown to have been followed by the IPCC.

RD of WA
Feb 04, 2008 14:32:10 PM [permalink] [report comment]

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mymalifexx of AL
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