How Warming Winters Are Affecting Everything
Winters are warming faster than other seasons across much of the U.S. While that may sound like a welcome change for those bundled in scarves and hats, it's causing a cascade of unpredictable impacts in communities across the country.
Temperatures continue to steadily rise around the globe, but that trend isn't spread evenly across the map or even the yearly calendar.
"The cold seasons are warming faster than the warm seasons," says Deke Arndt, chief of climate monitoring at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. "The colder times of day are warming faster than warmer times of day. And the colder places are warming faster than the warmer places."
In the U.S., that means winters in both Maine and Alaska are around 5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter on average since the early 1900s. One reason: the snowpack, which is a good reflector of sunlight, is melting earlier in the season. With fewer days of snow cover, sunlight is absorbed into the ground and warms the surrounding area.
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Still, winter warming can be seen almost everywhere. January 2020 was the Earth's hottest recorded January on average, compared with 141 years of temperature records. The four warmest Januaries have all occurred since 2016.
"Those changes are big," Arndt says. "We're not just watching numbers. We're watching changes in real people's real lives."
Here are some of those changes happening around the country.
CALIFORNIA
The nation's largest economy and largest agricultural industry is heavily reliant on snow that falls high in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which acts like a giant reservoir. The snowpack lasts through the winter and melts in
