In Park City, Utah, skiers could find patches of grass poking through the slopes for much of the winter — a striking sign of a season that never really arrived. Now, after one of the warmest winters on record, much of the West is entering spring with snowpack at historic lows and an early heat wave that pushed temperatures into triple digits.
These woes could be straight out of a climate fiction novel. But the West’s no good, very bad winter was alarmingly real. And, experts say, a worrisome combination of low snowpack and a devastating heat wave could create a summer ripe for climate disasters. “There is no analog,” Marianne Cowherd, a climate scientist at Montana State University, said of what’s happening. “There isn’t a year in the historical record we can look to for information … This limits our ability to look to the past for insight.”
Much of that uncertainty stems from what’s happening to the region’s snowpack, a cornerstone of its water system. Snow accounts for 60 to 70 percent of the Northwest’s water supply and is especially critical to the... Read more
