Warmer temperatures and rising sea levels are only part of the story when it comes to climate change in the Pacific Northwest. The University of Washington’s Amy Snover talks about the impact to the region on the UW Tacoma Podcast Paw’d Defiance. Snover serves as both director of the Climate Impacts Group and university director of the Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center. She is also an affiliate associate professor.
Host: What does the science say about how climate change will impact the Pacific Northwest?
Dr. Amy Snover: Climate change will unfold in many different ways across the Northwest and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that every part of the region and every sector of our economy in every community will be affected in some way.
Climate change is going to cause warmer temperatures, right? It already is in fact. We can trace the impacts of increased temperatures and there’s a lot of them. A major one is decreasing our mountain snow pack. We depend a lot on mountain snow pack including for drinking water, for farms and for forest ecosystems in the region.
So when it gets warmer, there’ll be less snow, right? It’ll still be precipitating in the winter, but it’ll be coming more as rain and less this snow. So that means higher river flows and likely higher floods, especially west of the Cascades in the fall and early winter. A shorter way of saying this is climate change is going to give us more water when we don’t want it during floody wet times, less water when we do want it during dry summer periods.
We’ve been experiencing a lot of wildfires in previous years and we expect climate change is going to increase the risk, the frequency, the size of a wildfires across the Northwest.
Host: What about cities like Seattle, Tacoma and Portland?
Dr. Amy Snover: Climate change will unfold or affect our cities or metropolitan areas through both changes that happen right there in the city and through the way that climate change affects everything, the city depends on.
I mentioned increase frequency of wildfires and we have experienced a couple bad years recently where smoke from wildfires reached the Puget Sound metropolitan areas. It’s pretty common east of the mountains, but we’re not used to it here. We just expect as wildfire frequency increases not only in Washington, but in Oregon, in British Columbia, and as we see in California that all of that will affect our air quality.
Hear the full episode here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/265902/2013153-climate-change-in-the-pacific-northwest
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