Future winters promise less snow, more rain. Nobody’s prepared
Blue veins of ice streaked the snow this January in Salt Lake City, Utah. Snow hydrologist McKenzie Skiles eyed the veins, worried. … Studies from her lab and others find that less snow is falling on mountains worldwide, and there’s more rain in the forecast. … [C]limate models of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains predict that, at 3 degrees warming, more than half the range’s precipitation will fall as rain, not snow. That would be disastrous for the Golden State, where snowmelt from the Sierras is a third of the water supply. California simply doesn’t have the infrastructure to capture all that water from rain. More rain will also change flood risks. … Overall, less snow compromises drinking and agricultural water storage in the West.
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