What Are Snow Droughts and Is Climate Change Making Them Worse?

Scientists distinguish among an expanding variety of droughts. There are droughts when it doesn’t rain. There are droughts when soil is too dry, when rivers and groundwater levels fall, and when water storage can’t meet society’s needs. Increasingly, researchers also are talking about snow droughts, which a new study in the journal Nature links to climate change. There are also connections between snow droughts and wildfires.

The term is old, with use peaking in the late 1970s, according to the Google Books Ngram viewer. It bubbled up again during the 2010s as regions that depend on snowpack for water saw their bounties thin, and it began to climb in 2017. That’s when three US researchers wrote an essay titled “Defining Snow Drought and Why It Matters,” which kicked off a global effort to document trends around the world and explain them.