The Globe and Mail - Loss of snow and impact on water supplies tied to climate change
“[A] new study has linked an overall reduction in snowpack – the volume of snow that is present on the landscape – to human-caused global warming, and points to the likelihood that more dramatic changes lie ahead. The results forecast implications for ecosystems and watersheds that are supplied by melting snow every spring, and a change in how people who live in northern countries such as Canada come to experience winter.”
Click here to read the article on The Globe and Mail
A new study - highlighted in The Globe and Mail - reveals the impact that climate change has played on snowpack across the Northern Hemisphere, and the accelerating shift toward an increasingly snowless future. The implications for regional hydrology are not uniform across Canada or any other nation (some regions may experience more snowpack, others less), but it is clear that changing snowpack dynamics will certainly result in changes to the overall behaviour of hydrologic systems and exacerbate water resources vulnerability in the coming decades.
“the study offers a warning for many locations that it is time to plan for a very different water regime due to an anticipated loss of snowpack.”
Snow water equivalent (SWE) for winter / spring and historic (HS) / mid-century (MC) / end-century (EC) periods. SWE forecasts are listed in units of kg/sqm, with MC and EC trends displayed as absolute changes compared to the HS period. Mean values are inset at the bottom-left of each map. As you can see from the prevalent blue in the MC and EC forecasts, many regions of Canada are expected to experience reduced snowpack in the coming years.
Snowpack plays such a crucial role in water resources management, especially in regions that rely on snowmelt for a significant portion of their water supply. Snowpack serves as a natural reservoir, storing water in the form of snow during the winter months. This stored water is released gradually during the warmer months as snow melts, providing a steady and reliable source of water for downstream ecosystems and human activities. Monitoring and understanding snowpack conditions are essential for effective water resource management, as it helps authorities plan for water distribution, anticipate potential droughts or floods, and implement strategies to adapt to changing climate conditions.
The Canada1Water project is keenly interested in snowpack trends across Canada, and our climatological modelling teams are hard at work producing best-in-class projections of snowpack in the coming decades. The figure to the right illustrates some of the expected trends in snow water equivalents (a measure of the the amount of water contained in a snowpack) across Canada at mid- (2060) and end-century (2100) periods. These snow-water equivalent projections will be applied as forcing data (boundary conditions) to fully-integrated groundwater-surface water simulations (using HydroGeoSphere) of seven major drainage basins covering all of continental Canada, providing water resources engineers and policy analysts reliable, physics-based forecasts of key hydrologic metrics such as streamflow, groundwater level and soil moisture.
Review the blog posts below to learn more about the snowpack modelling being conducted through the Canada1Water project:
Clearing the path to project snow on a continental scale (January 2023 newsletter article)
Climate Change Impacts on Mountain Snowpacks (Canada1Water Collaborator Research Highlight)
CMOS BULLETIN - Bias Correcting Surface Snow Water Equivalent Estimates using Machine Learning (Canada1Water Collaborator Research Highlight)
Future snow changes over the Columbia Mountains, Canada, using a distributed snow model (Canada1Water Collaborator Research Highlight)