Warmer weather means more moisture in the air, which means more rain and more snow. Yet, a cold spell in the West has prevented the snow from melting, and now we have a problem.
Thanks to a blizzard-filled winter and an unusually cold and wet spring, more than 90 measuring sites from Montana to New Mexico and California to Colorado have record snowpack totals on the ground for late May, according to a federal report released last week.
Those giant and spectacularly beautiful snowpacks will now melt under the hotter, sunnier skies of June — mildly if weather conditions are just right, wildly and perhaps catastrophically if they are not.
Fear of a sudden thaw, releasing millions of gallons of water through river channels and narrow canyons, has disaster experts on edge.
Of course, the good news is that there is plenty of water for drinking and irrigation.
Hydrologists, meanwhile, are cheering what they say will be a huge increase in water reservoir storage for tens of millions of people across the West. Lake Mead and Lake Powell, two huge dammed reservoirs on the Colorado River battered in recent years by drought, are projected to get 1.5 trillion gallons of new water between them from the mammoth melt.
The bad news is that many communities have been built up in recent decades that are vulnerable to massive, sudden flooding.
Floods kill more Americans than lightning, tornados or hurricanes in an average year, according to federal figures. And flash floods, usually associated with summer downpours, like the one that killed more than 140 people in Big Thompson Canyon in Colorado in 1976, can come as if from nowhere.
“It just takes one really sunny hot spell to get things running,” said Arthur Hinojosa, the chief of the Hydrology and Flood Operations Office with the California Department of Water Resources. “And that’s where our concern lies.”
But try explaining to a Republican that melting snow at the North Pole causes record snowpack in the Rocky Mountains. I guarantee, it won’t compute.
Not to be too pedantic, but actually, it doesn’t compute. It’s melting ice at the North Pole (the Arctic gets very little precipitation), and it doesn’t cause the record Rocky Mountain snowpack – they’re two phenomena with the same cause.
But Republicans don’t understand that, either. In the case of elected officials, they’re paid quite handsomely to not understand it.
Yes, technically, it is melting ice and increased evaporation.
Actually, it sorta computes. According to NOAA’s 2010 Arctic Report Card: “There continues to be significant excess heat storage in the Arctic Ocean at the end of summer due to continued near-record sea ice loss. There is evidence that the effect of higher air temperatures in the lower Arctic atmosphere in fall is contributing to changes in the atmospheric circulation in both the Arctic and northern mid-latitudes. … Recent data analysis and modeling suggest a link between loss of sea ice and a shift to an increased impact from the Arctic on mid-latitude climate. … With future loss of sea ice, such conditions as winter 2009-2010 could happen more often. Thus we have a potential climate change paradox. Rather than a general warming everywhere, the loss of sea ice and a warmer Arctic can increase the impact of the Arctic on lower latitudes, bringing colder weather to southern locations.” (http://tinyurl.com/2damqfj)
It’s not that much of a paradox. There are plenty of places (the Pacific NW, where I live, is one) where modeling shows that climate change will result in cooler and wetter weather even though the overall global impact is greater warming and drought. But I’m surprised that the linkage between the far north Arctic and the American Rockies is so direct. I don’t usually think of New Mexico, 35 deg N., as “northern mid-latitudes.” 45 deg. N. is the border between Montana and Wyoming. People often don’t realize how big Canada is, and how far north it goes.
Or the fact that northern Augusta Maine is on roughly the same lattitude as Marseille. Europe goes quite far north as well–which is one reason they don’t have mosquitoes like we do.
The water in all that ice has to go SOMEWHERE.
as an excuse to build a lot more in the desert southwest. In the past, flush years for water has led to overbuilding. Probably not now in the housing glut…