I love winter and I love snow, but I hate wintery rain and you probably do, too. If it’s going to be cold and precipitating, it better be what TV weather folks love to call “the white stuff.”
But increasingly it’s not, especially in New Hampshire, as Climate Central reports. (Full report is here.)
Our analysis included 2,121 weather stations and looked at days with precipitation from the months that typically see at least 1 inch of snow so we could get a full sense of not just winter, but the snowy shoulder seasons as well. In some places, this snowy season spanned October through April, while in others it only ranged December to February.
Overall, 55 percent of the stations showed a decrease in winter precipitation falling as snow, with the biggest dropoff happening in those shoulder seasons. Rising temperatures mean hotter falls and spring arriving earlier. The result is that precipitation falling in those shoulder months is increasingly likely to fall as rain rather than snow.
Idaho saw the biggest drop with 83 percent of its stations reporting a decline. Arizona and New Hampshire round out the top three with 82 and 73 percent of their stations reporting more increasing snowy season rain, respectively.
Thus endeth today’s depressing climate-change report.