(Toronto) A new study suggests that human-caused climate change is behind a sharp decline in spring snowpack across large areas of the Northern Hemisphere, including parts of Ontario and Quebec.
The study published in the journal Nature abstracts from isolated measurements and models to find that climate change has altered spring snowpack in 31 major river basins in the Northern Hemisphere, including the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes.
Researchers from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire say that although observations in the St. Lawrence had previously suggested that snowpack trends were small and insignificant, their study indicates that anthropocentric climate change was responsible for a 7% decline. of snow accumulation in March per decade over 40 years.
PhD student Alex Gottlieb says he and his co-author arrived at these results after comparing several major data sets. They positively identified snowpack trends, then compared those trends to climate models simulating snowpack levels in the absence of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
According to Gottlieb, despite some inconsistencies between different data sets, it is clear that the long-term trend in snowpack for some large basins “really only corresponds to a world in which we have emitted so much gas greenhouse that we did it.
According to a leading Canadian expert on water resources and climate change, John Pomeroy, who was not involved in the study, Canada is already seeing the effects of reduced spring snowpack in the form of droughts and forest fires.