How is the character of winter precipitation in the western United States changing as the climate warms, and what does that mean for the snow that forms?
Across 33 years of station records, storm temperatures have warmed widely enough to shift a meaningful fraction of historic snowfall toward conditions where it is vulnerable to no longer reliably accumulating as snowpack. Meanwhile, landfalling atmospheric rivers were found to deliver a disproportionate share of western snowpack at considerably warmer temperatures.
I led the analysis, dataset development, and writing for both studies as part of my MS work at Oregon State.