Climate change has made Colorado's severe winter drought far more likely, according to new study

Across Colorado, extreme weather has created a challenging year.

Wildfires sparked this summer are following a warm, dry winter.

At Colorado School of Mines, computational hydrologist Adrienne Marshall has been keeping a close eye on the effects of the state’s drought –– as well as what’s contributing to it.

Marshall looked at extreme weather events like heat waves and applied the same tools to snow conditions, comparing current conditions to historical ones, to determine if this year’s extreme drought was caused by climate change. The assistant professor at the college is also the lead scientist on a new study examining whether this year’s extreme weather can be attributed to climate change.

“Unfortunately, we found that this year’s snow drought was made about 4.5 times more likely across the western US,” Marshall said. “And if we zoom in on the Upper Colorado River Basin, we see that this year’s snow drought was about 14 times more likely because of human-caused climate change.”

Those results were published this week in a study in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.

“I wasn’t entirely surprised to see that these conditions were impacted by climate change. I was a little bit surprised by the magnitude of the results, like just how clear the signal was,” Marshall said. “If we think about that in terms of the missing water, across the western U.S. we’re missing a volume of water in the snow that’s about the size of Lake Mead.”

Marshall said the models they used in the study may offer a glimpse into Colorado’s future if greenhouse gas emissions don’t drop.

“We saw that conditions like the ones we’ve had this year would be about 3 times as likely as they are now by the 2050s. And then by the late 21st century, conditions at least this bad would be more common than not,” Marshall said.

Marshall said she hopes the extreme conditions will inspire action to combat human-caused climate change. Otherwise, these extreme winters might start to feel normal.

“They’re conditions that we should prepare for, so we should think carefully about how do we want to adapt if we have more years like this,” she said.

What can be done to combat climate change and lower greenhouse gas emissions is a big question, Marhsall said, one that will ultimately be decided by political scientists and action from governments around the globe.

She hopes her data can be helpful in showing the science behind the problem and help find solutions to turn this trend around.