by Staff Writers
Paris (ESA)
 Time series of Northern Hemisphere June snow cover (red), June sea-ice extent (black) and September sea-ice extent (grey). Thick lines denote five-year running mean. Relative to a 1979-2000 baseline, June snow cover – also known as ‘snow areal extent’ – has declined by 17.6%, whereas September sea-ice has declined by 13.0%. Credits: C. Derksen and R. Brown, Environment Canada (Data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center and Rutgers University Global Snow Lab) |
Santa Claus may someday need wheels for his sleigh – satellites show a decreasing amount of snow in the Northern Hemisphere. A new analysis of snow cover observed by satellites shows record lows in Eurasia for June each year since 2008. In addition, three of the past five years have seen record low cover in North America.
This is the lowest June snow extent since satellite observations began some 45 years ago. June snow cover is found to be falling much faster than expected from climate models, and is disappearing even quicker than summertime Arctic sea-ice.
These results, published in Geophysical Research Letters in October and based on snow chart data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), are consistent with indications of a decline in monthly-average snow mass, published last year as part of ESA’s GlobSnow project.
The results show that the maximum amount of snow across the Northern Hemisphere is slowly falling, while spring snow – particularly at high latitudes – is melting significantly earlier.
GlobSnow produced a long time-series of snow mass from 1979 to 2012, as well as a time-series of snow cover from 1995 to 2012.
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