30 Feet Of Snow In August - Mt.Baker, WA (climate, snowfall, hot)
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30 Feet of Snow in August. So much snow remains, WSDOT can't plow it all. The last time they decided not to clear to Artist point was in 1999, the year a world record was set for annual snowfall. The road to Artist Point is 2.7 miles long and more than 5,000 feet above sea level, and is typically buried under snow and closed October through June. In recent years, it has usually opened in July.
We have had an unusually heavy snowpack throughout the Cascade Range from Garibaldi in B.C. clear down to Lassen Peak near Susanville in California. This is due, in part, to an unusually wet and chilly spring and early summer for the entire west coast. As an example, in western Oregon where I live, more snow fell March and April than the entire snow season preceeding it. More snow yet fell in May at higher elevations and the melt didn't start in earnest (or anywhere else) until early June.
So why did we get so "lucky"? People far more expert in Climate Science than I postulate a long term, cyclic ocean circulation pattern they call the Pacific Decadal Oscillatiion (PDO) that alternately drives the polar storm track northward or southward depending on which phase of the cycle it is in. This present, negative, PDO phase is pushing the storm track closer to us rather than farther away; and when I say "long term" I mean exactly that. We will be under this general weather pattern for up to the next 30 years but it'll probably end sooner than that.
We've experienced a number of these cycles. We have good temperature and rainfall records for a number of western U.S. locations that go back as far as the 1870's and all of them exhibit this wave-like pattern of higher and lower temperatures; more or less rain fall and greater or lesser rainfall frequency. The variation isn't that much, only a few degrees or so and the period of the wave is anywhere from 40 to 60 years so the pattern is hard to tease out - but it is there; we have measurements for about three of these things. Tree ring and other proxy data give us good extrapolations for half a dozen, maybe even ten more.
Too much information, I know. But there are some takeaways from all this.
1. We are about 5 years into the cooler/wetter phase of this PDO cycle so we'e in for a very long seige of wet, chilly and possibly more snowy winters at low elevations.
2. There will be very little warmup come springtime and frequent rains (high elevation snow) will continue into the season far longer than we are now accustomed to.
3. My expectation is that though more rain will fall at all times of the year we will also have fewer violent storms. What storms we do get, however, will be more violent.
4. Summer will be brief, cloudy and cool. We may have a 30 to 50% increase in the amount of rain and the frequency at which it falls. We will not be able to depend on fine dry weather at any time.
5. Snowpacks will linger much farther into the summer. This will mean a more dependable supply of water for the summer dry season (which will still be relatively dry). We will probably arrest the extensive glacier shrinkage now going on in the Cascades and possibly even make up for some of the ice loss.
6. There will still be climate variability during the next 30 or so years. It will not be uniformly cold and miserable. We will still get the occassional mild winter or hot summer. It is merely that they will no longer be expected.
7. And lastly, this will not go on forever. We still have a very strong world wide warming signal to contend with that is not seen here only because of the effects of the negative half of the PDO cycle. I am further guessing that if future warming occurs at the same rate it is at present much of the PDO effects we are now seeing on the west coast will be blunted or cancelled out entirely as the cycle nears its end.
There are a lot of trails in Alberta (eastern slopes of the Rockies) that still have large snow patches on them. These places are usually clear by the end of June. I suspect some of them will last the summer...NEW GLACIERS!!!!
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