SALT LAKE CITY — Western winters are getting shorter because of dust kicked up by urban and agricultural development, a University of Utah researcher said.
Thomas Painter, formerly with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder and now head of the Utah school’s Snow Optics Laboratory, said disturbed particles from the Colorado Plateau mix with snow, limiting the heat it can reflect. As a result, today’s snowpacks melt about a month earlier than they once did. Painter’s research affirms longtime anecdotal claims that the dirtier snow is, the faster it melts.
“That has enormous implications up and down the line,” Painter said.
He said the change is important because when the snow cover dissipates earlier than it should, the ground is exposed at a vulnerable time. This can hurt the local ecology.
“That has some impact on regional climate,” he said. “We’re seeing a 1.5 degree Centigrade temperature increase.”
Painter is now studying Utah’s Wasatch Range. He says the snowpack there is under serious assault from dust and soot. Wasatch canyons provide most of Salt Lake City’s water and are economically significant for winter recreation.
“If it’s possible to clean up the snowpack, we can buy significant time to increase snowpack duration,” he said. “We have enormous amounts of research to do. I look forward to doing it over the next decade.”
Painter said dust’s effects on snow are a global problem. The disappearance of central Asia’s Aral Sea, for example, magnifies ecological devastation by sending plumes of dust off the dry lake bed.
The dust blows east and settles in China’s Tienshan mountain range, where it disrupts the snowpack’s hydrologic cycles.