Meltdown: More Rain, Less Snow as the World Warms

One of the great tricks of chartmanship ("How to lie with graphs") is to choose carefully your starting and end points for any trend. And that appears to have been done here. Why start at 1950?  Surely precipitation records go a long way further back than that.  

And I think I know why they chose 1950. We know that there were more extreme weather events in the first half of C20 so the trends before and after 1950 were probably different -- thus obliterating their trend for the century as a whole.

And the end point is interesting too.  With all the admissions by Warmists themselves that C21 has seen a "hiatus" in warming, why were C20 and C21 results all lumped in together and presented as a single  continuous trend?  There WAS some slight warming in C20 so it is entirely open for us to conclude that the trends they observed were entirely located in the C20 data and there were no trends in our present century.  Most unimpressive work


As the world warms, the meaning of winter is changing. In the U.S., a greater percentage of winter precipitation is falling as rain, with potentially severe consequences in western states where industries and cities depend on snowpack for water, and across the country wherever there is a winter sports economy.

A Climate Central analysis of 65 years of winter precipitation data from more than 2,000 weather stations in 42 states, found a decrease in the percent of precipitation falling as snow in winter months for every region of the country. Winter months were defined as the snow season for each station, from the month with the first consistently significant snow, to the last.

In western states where snowpack is critical, we found decreases in the percent of winter precipitation falling as snow at elevations between sea level and 5,000 feet.  Above 5,000 feet there is clear regional variation.  In California, Colorado, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico there was either no trend toward rain or a slight trend toward more snow at elevations 5,000 feet and higher. In stark contrast, between 5,000 to 8,000 feet in Montana, Idaho, and Arizona, from 75 to 78 percent of all stations report an increase in rain as a percentage of total winter precipitation. Oregon has only one station above 5,000 feet, but it too reported a strong increase in rain vs snow as winter precipitation. Washington has no stations at this elevation.

These very different results at elevations above 5,000 feet may stem from the different underlying climate and weather patterns in the two regions that has delayed the shift toward more rain above 5,000 feet in Rocky Mountain states, but accelerated it in the Northwest.

In virtually all states with stations below 2,000 feet, the data show a trend toward a higher percentage of rain during the winter precipitation season.

SOURCE

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