Critical Snow Cover Quantification Enabled by DOE’s SPRUCE Experiment

The Science

Climate change is reducing the amount, duration, and extent of snow across high-latitude ecosystems. But, in landscapes where persistent winter snow cover develops, experimental platforms to specifically investigate interactions between warming and changes in snowpack and impacts on ecosystem processes, have been lacking.

Experimental warming observations at the large-scale Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments (SPRUCE) study in northern Minnesota enabled direct quantification of how future climate change will influence snowpack and associated hydrology of important ecosystems.

The Impact

Results showed how future warming at levels consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections will result in transformative changes to the winter season in boreal peatlands, with impacts on how these ecosystems function and their impact on the climate system.

Summary

A team of researchers used the SPRUCE study, an active field warming experiment, to disentangle changes in winter precipitation forms under plausible future winter warming. Even modest levels of warming had severe negative impacts on snow variables. For example, warming of just +2°C was sufficient to reduce the number of winter days with a 5 cm snowpack by about 50%. Reductions in snow cover have feedback effects on local winter climate because shrub‐covered ground reflects less solar energy than snow‐covered ground. Researchers estimated that because of this so‐called “snow‐albedo feedback,” maximum daytime air temperature will be elevated by up to about 1°C above snow‐free ground when compared to snow‐covered ground.

Principal Investigator

Paul Hanson
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
[email protected]

Program Manager

Daniel Stover
U.S. Department of Energy, Biological and Environmental Research (SC-33)
Environmental System Science
[email protected]

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the Biological and Environmental Research program within the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by UT‐Battelle, LLC, for DOE under contract DE‐AC05‐00OR22725.

Related Links

• SPRUCE Website
• PhenoCam

References