I don’t know about you but I’ve got more snow in my yard right now than I’ve had for at least three winters.
All that snow is kind of a pain I’m when post-holing my way around the field or digging out the mailbox, but mostly it’s delightful, a reminder of the way New Hampshire winters are supposed to look and feel. With above-freezing temperatures slated for this week after almost a month of below-freezing temps, this might be the high point of winter.
Which makes me wonder: Isn’t late February kind of late for the “high point” of winter? Doesn’t that usually happen a few weeks earlier than this?
In other words, I wondered whether climate change is not only making our winters shorter and wimpier but is also changing the pattern of their growth and decline over the course of the season.
Thanks to basic science, I know the answer to that question: No.
“Using 56 years of snow water equivalent data from the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, researchers found that … the date at which the snowpack reaches its annual maximum has not changed” says a study out of the long-running research station north of Plymouth, published Dec. 18 in PLOS Climate, an open-access journal.
The study confirmed the common knowledge that our winters are getting wimpier – “maximum snowpack size and snowpack duration are shrinking at all sites, at rates ranging from 4.3 days per decade at the coldest site to 9.6 days per decade at the warmest site” – but found they still peak at the same time of year, even if the peak is less peaky.
The lead author of the study is Geoff Wilson, manager of field and lab operations at Hubbard Brook, the 8,300-acre research forest that was established in 1955. Wilson says he wasn’t trying to prove any particular hypothesis with this study.
“We have this really rich, long record of snowpack and it’s obviously relevant to our region. I found it hadn’t been published on since 2010 so we thought it was time to look at it again,” Wilson said.
Hubbard Brooks Forest’s data record is valuable not because it had a long record of snow depth but also a long record of snow-water equivalent or SWE, which measures how much moisture is in the snow. That makes a big difference when temperatures rise.
“If there’s more melt, there’s got to be soil moisture implications – same with the streams. This is useful to people studying winter ecosystems,” Wilson said.
Combined with other data – daily temperature, precipitation, solar radiation, humidity –“we could piece that together and ask questions like how is the snowpack changing and why?” Wilson said.
There’s no immediate conclusion from this study, no “action item” in biz-speak. It’s a classic bit of basic research that provides information for potential future study.
Self-described pragmatists who don’t understand how the world works love to attack basic research as ivory tower fluff, a plaything of academics that’s of no real use. They’re dead wrong.
Basic science is the bedrock on which modern society is built. You don’t get “practical” science and its valuable results without basic science underpinning it.
In this case, for example, it’s quite possible that a future analysis of winter ecosystems using this data will tell us how to build roads or houses to better withstand our changing winters, or point to forest management techniques to let us harvest more maple syrup or lumber, or show how to keep the deer herd healthy as everything alters around them.
Not paying to do basic research because you don’t see an immediate return is classic penny-wise-pound-foolish, short-term thinking. Fortunately, America isn’t that dim. At least, we didn’t used to be.
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