Guest essay by Eric Worrall

The recent Mothers Day Freeze which smashed cold records across the Midwest, East and South has not deterred Northern Illinois University from making an end of snow prediction.

Climate change could dramatically reduce U.S. snowstorms

by  Northern Illinois University
MAY 26, 2020

A new study led by Northern Illinois University scientists suggests American winters late this century could experience significant decreases in the frequency, intensity and size of snowstorms.

Under an unabated greenhouse gas emissions scenario, the study projects 28% fewer snowstorms on average per year over central and eastern portions of North America by the century’s last decade, with one-third the amount of snow or frozen precipitation and a 38% loss in average snowstorm size.

“If we do little to mitigate climate change, the winter season will lose much of its punch in the future,” said Walker Ashley, an NIU professor of meteorology and lead author of the study, published today (May 25) in Nature Climate Change.

“The snow season will start later and end earlier,” Ashley said. “Generally, what we consider an abnormally mild winter now, in terms of the number and intensity of snowstorms, will be the harshest of winters late this century. There will be fewer snowstorms, less overall precipitation that falls as snow and almost a complete removal of snow events in the southern tier of the United States.“

…

The study is believed to be the first to objectively identify and track individual snowstorm projections of the distant future—from minor snow accumulations, to average winter storms, to crippling blizzards.

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Read more: https://phys.org/news/2020-05-climate-snowstorms.html

The abstract of the study;

Reduced frequency and size of late-twenty-first-century snowstorms over North America

Walker S. Ashley, Alex M. Haberlie & Vittorio A. Gensini 

Nature Climate Change (2020) Cite this article

Understanding how snowstorms may change in the future is critical for estimating impacts on water resources and the Earth and socioeconomic systems that depend on them. Here we use snowstorms as a marker to assess the mesoscale fingerprint of climate change, providing a description of potential changes in winter weather event occurrence, character and variability in central and eastern North America under a high anthropogenic emissions pathway. Snowstorms are segmented and tracked using high-resolution, snow water equivalent output from dynamically downscaled simulations which, unlike global climate models, can resolve important mesoscale features such as banded snow. Significant decreases are found in the frequency and size of snowstorms in a pseudo-global warming simulation, including those events that produce the most extreme snowfall accumulations. Early and late boreal winter months show particularly robust proportional decreases in snowstorms and snow water equivalent accumulations.

Read more (paywalled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0774-4

Climate alarmists just can’t seem to help themselves. Their most extreme models might hindcast absurdity, but climate alarmists choose to believe in their models anyway, so they follow where their models lead.