A warming ocean adds more moisture to the atmosphere, and when conditions are ripe for storms to form, heavy rainfall or snowfall results. In just hours, my part of the country will have received back-to-back winter storms that did not and will not drop snow but rather heavy flooding rain. Bitter-cold Arctic temperatures as low as thirty degrees below zero in parts of the high plains will follow and move east quickly, flash-freezing the Great Lakes accompanied by blizzard conditions—the storm then moves to the heavily populated Northeast. Power outages could be widespread, and since the Northeast soil is already heavily saturated, flooding will occur in some areas.
No single event can be attributed to climate change, but precipitation pattern disruption and other trends can help explain some natural disasters' severity, expanse, and distribution.
I have no children, but yours will likely see less and less snow, according to a new study published in Nature. It found that snowfall has a non-linear response to average warming winter temperatures (17 F), meaning snow declines slowly and then falls off a cliff at a certain threshold due to the damage humans have willfully inflicted on the ocean and atmosphere.
The findings include the western and Northeastern United States.
The Seneca Cliff, also known as the Seneca effect or Seneca collapse, is a mathematical model proposed by Ugo Bardi1. It describes situations where a system's rate of decline is much sharper than its earlier rate of growth1. The concept of the Seneca Cliff tells us that the overexploitation of natural resources often leads to an abrupt decline that takes people by surprise2. Wiki
Zoë Schlanger writes on the study in the Atlantic:
Nonlinear relationships indicate accelerated change; shifts are small for a while but then, past a certain threshold, escalate quickly. In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, two Dartmouth researchers report finding a distinctly nonlinear relationship between increasing winter temperatures and declining snowpacks. And they identify a “snow loss cliff”—an average winter-temperature threshold below which snowpack is largely unaffected, but above which things begin to change fast.
That threshold is 17 degrees Fahrenheit. Remarkably, 80 percent of the Northern Hemisphere’s snowpack exists in far-northern, high-altitude places that, for now, on average, stay colder than that. There, the snowpack seems to be healthy and stable, or even increasing. But as a general rule, when the average winter temperature exceeds 17 degrees (–8 degrees Celsius), snowpack loss begins, and accelerates dramatically with each additional degree of warming.
Already, millions of people who rely on the snowpack for water live in places that have crossed that threshold and will only get hotter. “A degree beyond that might take away 5 to 10 percent of the snowpack, then the next degree might cut away 10 to 15 percent, then 15 to 20 percent,” Alexander Gottlieb, the first author on the paper, told me over the phone as I looked out my window in New York City, where it has rained several times over the past few days. “Once you get around the freezing point”—32 degrees Fahrenheit—“you can lose almost half of your snow from just an additional degree of warming,” he said. New York City, which was recently reclassified as a “humid subtropical” climate, has clocked nearly 700 consecutive days with less than an inch of snowfall. It’s definitely over the snow-loss cliff, and as global temperatures increase, more places will follow.
“Once a basin has fallen off that cliff, it’s no longer about managing a short-term emergency until the next big snow. Instead, they will be adapting to permanent changes to water availability,” Mankin said in a press release.
Previous research has documented losses of snow cover in a warming world — but that’s different than this study on snowpack, which measures how much water is in the snow rather than the geographic range of snow cover. Most of the water rushing through rivers in the Northern Hemisphere comes from snow. That makes it really important to understand how snowpack is changing with the climate, especially as communities face dwindling resources.
“The study reveals a surprising nonlinear relationship between snow mass and temperature, which has complex ramifications,” Jouni Pulliainen, a research professor at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, writes in an accompanying article that comments on the new research.
The researchers only saw minimal snowpack loss in 80 percent of the Northern Hemisphere where winters tend to be colder. Parts of Alaska, Canada, and Central Asia even experienced increased snowpack. Eventually, though, if the planet keeps heating up, even those places could fall off the snow-loss cliff.
The remaining 20 percent of the hemisphere that lost the most snowpack happens to be where a majority of people in the Northern Hemisphere live. That includes the Southwestern and Northeastern US, and central and eastern Europe, where snowpack diminished by as much as 20 percent per decade.
Processes and cycles interconnect the Earth's subsystems. Over time, they store, transform, and transfer matter and energy throughout the whole Earth system and react with each other. An example is when rain hits land.
Associate Professor Louis Schipper, The University of Waikato
Water from rain comes down onto the land and the soil and the plants growing on it, and it is important that water can infiltrate it, and then be held by soil so that the plants can then access it. If that water just flows through down into groundwater, the plants are not going to be able to grow on it, and it’s not going to be able to support forest, or plants and animals – that sort of thing. So the soil has to be able to hold onto that water, and when it rains, the water predominantly ends up in smallest holes first. That is where it’s stored, and that is because those small pores can hold onto water really quite tightly.
Whatever we are going to do, we better do it fast.
The European Copernicus had an average planetary temperature 2023 of 1.48 Celsius above the 1850 to 1900 Baseline. Berkeley Earth has it at 1.54 over the same baseline.