Melting Snowpack in the Rockies

Decreasing snowpack seems to me more of a function of drought conditions than Global Warming.

Climate change drying up Western Rockies

By Amanda Beck

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - By 2040, climate change will have melted the glaciers of Glacier National Park in Montana and the spring snowpack in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, scientists said on Tuesday.

"People talk about a tipping point, but we've been there and done that," said Tim Barnett, a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California and speaker at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

About 15,000 researchers have...(complete article here).

If the snowpack reduction is a result of Global Warming, where did all of the water go? It must enter the hydrologic cycle and will fall again as rain or snow. Will there be an increase in rainfall in areas that have historically been dry? Is the excessive rainfall that we saw in Texas this past summer a result of that melted snowpack? Is it just going to raise the ocean level? If temperatures increase globally, more water will evaporate from the ocean to fall again as rain. Maybe we need to be building reservoirs to catch that rainfall.

Will increased rainfall in the Plains re-charge the Ogalalla Acquifer through basins such as playa lakes? Perhaps we should focus on playa revitalization.

We are planning to spend billions of dollars to prevent climate change -- which many say is already occurring. Would it be better to spend those dollars preparing for the eventuality of that change? I'm not referring to emergency preparedness -- such as for flooding, hurricanes, etc. I'm referring to things like planning infrastructure for shifting agricultural practices, moving population centers, etc. Water will be -- and is already -- critical. It may be a situation of "water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink" -- or to irrigate crops.