We can cut this data a lot of ways, but in all honesty it shows another poor year following a prior poor year. The seasons are getting shorter and the temperatures are on average slightly warmer. On average this situation is not going to get better. We will still have our good years but they will be fewer and farther in between. This January I suspect will be bleak followed maybe by some mild improvement in February and March if we are lucky. The problem is the lower elevation snowpack it will not improve. There has been an amazing change in the lower elevation snowpack compared to two three decades ago. Now it can not even be called a snowpack. Snoqualmie is the first of the major passes to see this big drop in average snowpack. You can dress up the pig, but it is still a pig. You can try and talk around it, but climate change is upon us and it is accelerating.
Regrettably, I think Floater has it exactly right.
Anecdotally I totally agree, but as a scientist I'd want to see data to back up my perception. Is my sense of things just skewed by the short time period (climatically) that my perception is based on?
Are their data sets from representative lower elevation snow stations to prove Floater correct? Amar?
I agree that data is needed to back up the impression of declining lower elevation snowpack. I think if there was a network of lower elevation sensors in the Cascades the results would be shocking. Still, that is just an observation after 25 years of Cascades skiing.
Re: data and snowpack, yes it exists and there has been a fair amount of research published by folks at the UW and other places that shows snowpacks have generally declined over time. Try searching for "Washington snowpack climate change" or similar on Google Scholar. I remember reading some nice papers by Phil Mote a few years ago, and there have likely been others published since (honestly I stopped reading them since they were so depressing, especially the modeling studies with predictions for my son's generation).
Well I thought a lot about this over the past week, and finally spent the last day doing a lot of data analysis to try to find the answer. The answers are indeed "shocking" to all who hold the viewpoints stated above, as these views are simply demonstrated to be totally incorrect by hard data.
And sorry Gordy (Floater), I consider you a friend, so please don't take any of this as a personal attack on you or your views on this subject. I'm just trying to find the correct answers.
The analysis is far too long to post here, so I made a new thread:
Has the low-elevation snowpack in the Washington Cascades been declining over the past 2-3 decades??
