TY  - JOUR
A1  - Quante, Lennart
A1  - Willner, Sven N.
A1  - Middelanis, Robin
A1  - Levermann, Anders
T1  - Regions of intensification of extreme snowfall under future warming
T2  - Scientific reports
N2  - Due to climate change the frequency and character of precipitation are changing as the hydrological cycle intensifies. With regards to snowfall, global warming has two opposing influences; increasing humidity enables intense snowfall, whereas higher temperatures decrease the likelihood of snowfall. Here we show an intensification of extreme snowfall across large areas of the Northern Hemisphere under future warming. This is robust across an ensemble of global climate models when they are bias-corrected with observational data. While mean daily snowfall decreases, both the 99th and the 99.9th percentiles of daily snowfall increase in many regions in the next decades, especially for Northern America and Asia. Additionally, the average intensity of snowfall events exceeding these percentiles as experienced historically increases in many regions. This is likely to pose a challenge to municipalities in mid to high latitudes. Overall, extreme snowfall events are likely to become an increasingly important impact of climate change in the next decades, even if they will become rarer, but not necessarily less intense, in the second half of the century.
Y1  - 2021
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/62200
SN  - 2045-2322
VL  - 11
IS  - 1
PB  - Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature
CY  - Berlin
ER  -