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Snow loss pinned to human-induced emissions

Analysis of a large, varied data set reveals that snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has undergone marked changes in the past four decades. Evidence that humans caused the shift suggests that snow loss will accelerate in the future.
  1. Jouni Pulliainen

    1. Jouni Pulliainen is in the Space and Earth Observation Centre, Finnish Meteorological Institute, 00560 Helsinki, Finland.

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Predicting how anthropogenic climate change will affect the future availability of fresh water requires an understanding of variations in Earth’s seasonal snow cover — and how human-induced changes differ from natural fluctuations. But obtaining such information is no easy feat. Writing in Nature, Gottlieb and Mankin1 introduce a promising approach to the problem, which combines historical observations of snow mass in the Northern Hemisphere with spatially unified records of snow-cover evolution and climate-model predictions. The study reveals a surprising nonlinear relationship between snow mass and temperature, which has complex ramifications.

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Nature 625, 246-247 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03993-5

References

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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