Dwindling snow levels — a trend that’s extremely unlikely to reverse as temperatures keep rising — will demand hard choices if the 11 states in the Western US are to continue to thrive. Climate models predict that even when the current drought ends, the region will get less precipitation overall in the coming decades than it once did. Columbia University climate scientist Richard Seager’s lab has been modeling the next two decades of rainfall in the US Southwest, and all of the projections show the area will be drier than in the 1980s and 1990s.
“The Southwest has to get it in its head that it’s never going to get back to the levels of water availability that we had in the late 20th century,” he said.
“We’re going to see water scarcity limiting population,” said Andrew Schwartz, manager of the Central Sierra Snow Lab, which studies California’s snowpack from a perch near the Donner Pass. “I can’t give you an exact time. All I can say is given the trends in water supply and aridification of the Southwest, it’s probably going to happen sooner rather than later. And it’s probably going to be sooner than people are comfortable with”.
“The system is at a tipping point,” said Camille Calimlim Touton, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-western-us-snowpack-drought/