‘A Harbinger of the Future': Climate Scientists Respond to Boston’s Record-Breaking Snow Season

For much of the winter, the 108.6 inches of snow Boston got was nothing to celebrate.  When the season is over, Boston will have spent $50 million just trying to move snow out of the city.  The city’s subway and commuter rail systems were crippled.  In apartment buildings, melting snow leaked into the ceilings.  Cemeteries could not hold burials.  A lot of people lost their dogs.  Piles of trash are everywhere.

Scientists expect more of these extremely snowy winters for Boston and the Northeastern United States in the years to come, as sea surface temperatures get warmer and the atmosphere is able to hold more moisture.  Both those predicted characteristics are driven by human-made greenhouse gas emissions, which cause climate change.

[T]he projections into the future are for there to be more storms like this.

ThinkProgress spoke to three climate scientists, and they all agreed — as the planet as a whole warms, Boston is likely to be pummeled with snow.

“Climate projections into the future do project that there will be more extreme rain and snow events in the Northern part of the United States,” said Jack Fellows, director of the Climate Change Science Institute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  “No single storm is a prediction of climate change, but the projections into the future are for there to be more storms like this.”

The 2014 National Climate Assessment lays out these projections pretty well.  If carbon emissions are reduced, extreme precipitation events are still expected to occur nearly twice as often by 2100. If emissions increase, however, extreme rain and snowfall events are expected to occur up to four times as often.
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Those deep waves in the jet stream have been showing themselves often in recent years, said Tom Di Liberto, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center.  For the last three seasons, he said, there’s been a pattern where the jet stream dips across America, bringing high pressure and high temperatures to Alaska and California, and extreme low pressure to the east.

“The pattern set up so perfectly for all these types of storm systems to drop down out of Canada and just pummel New England and Boston with a ton of snow,” he said.  “The jet stream has certainly been wavy.  To get this stuff we’ve been seeing, it kind of has to be.  It’s certainly curious.”

Read more at ‘A Harbinger of the Future':  Climate Scientists Respond to Boston’s Record-Breaking Snow Season