How could climate change impact Colorado’s snowpack?

Continued climate change in Colorado could reduce snowpack in the Rockies. However, the issue isn’t that simple.

Mountain snow – it’s a precious resource that supplies water all across the state of Colorado year-round.

While global warming could reduce our snowpack at times in the coming decades, that same climate change could bring times of more intense snow as well. Climate change can increase the severity of weather patterns across the spectrum.

Even if we get times of healthy snow in the decades to come, that could be offset by periods of dry and hot weather, increasing the demand for water and potentially depleting out snowpack faster (remember, these are rough projections that involve nuance and uncertainty).

Research scientist Dr. Keith Musselman at CU Boulder explains.

“In the future climate with more rainfall and less snowpack – that system that we rely heavily upon starts to break down,” said Dr. Musselman.

That’s not the only problem global warming poses when it comes to snow in the Rockies.

New research, led by Dr. Musselman, shows that by the end of the century, flooding events could increase as weather systems dump heavy rain over snowpack in the western mountains of the U.S.

“Rain on snow, snow water resources, extreme precipitation, all of these things kind of come together into a package that we, there remains quite a bit of uncertainty and needs to be resolved in the coming decades as we go into the end of this century,” added Dr. Musselman.

This flooding threat isn’t imminent, but it’s something to track.

Here’s some good news about the new research: Colorado appears to be climatologically more resilient to these rain on snow events compared to the Sierra Nevadas for example. That’s due to colder temperatures at our high elevation.