Pacific Northwest’s 2015 weather likely to be repeated, climate scientists say

The unusual weather of 2015 is the Northwest’s trial run for future conditions under climate change, scientists say.

By around 2040, many ski areas will struggle with winter precipitation that falls as rain instead of snow. Salmon will have a tougher time migrating through warmer rivers. Farmers will have to adjust the types of crops they grow, and even rainy areas like Seattle will need to conserve water.

Those were a few of the projections Wednesday at the 6th annual Northwest Climate Change Conference, held in Coeur d’Alene, which brought together scientists from across a four-state region.

“We usually think of drought as not enough moisture falling from the skies,” said Phillip Mote, director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State University.

But this year resulted in a new addition to the Northwest’s weather vocabulary: Snow drought. Despite near-normal precipitation, temperatures about 4 degrees warmer than normal kept snow from piling up in the mountains. And the snowpacks that did form melted off early.

“It was just the beginning of what was to come,” said John Abatzoglou, an associate professor of geography at the University of Idaho.

The snow drought was followed by a hot, dry summer, which led to large closures of public lands as a result of wildfire danger. But the fires still burned, and Northwest residents spent most of August choking on unhealthy levels of air pollution.

“We’re seeing conditions this year that will be average by 2040 or later,” said OSU’s Mote.

Speakers noted that the climate shifts will occur within the lifetimes of many people attending the conference, including students from Lake City High School, who were at the conference as part of an advanced placement science class. Even with a global effort to slow greenhouse gas emissions, it will be hard to reverse the course of climate change, Mote said.

This year’s unusual weather was influenced by a high pressure ridge off the coast, which diverted storms away from Washington and Oregon, and warmer ocean temperatures that also heated up temperatures on land, said Nick Bond, Washington State Climatologist.

“We’ve had some remarkable weather,” Bond said. “It’s had impacts on ecosystems that are still playing out.”

His presentation included pictures of dead salmon and sea birds, which experienced mass die-offs. The warmer ocean changed the mix of small crustaceans called “copepods,” which form the base of saltwater food webs, Bond said.

Cooler ocean waters favor copepods that are fattier and provide a high-nutrient food for salmon. But this year, copepods that thrive in warmer waters were more prevalent in the ocean. They’re a less nutritious forage base, he said.

Warm water temperatures in the Columbia and Snake rivers also contributed to poor salmon survival, said Chip Corsi, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game’s regional manager in Coeur d’Alene.

About 50 sockeye returned to central Idaho’s Red Fish Lake, though 4,000 of the fish were counted at Bonneville Dam on the lower Columbia River. Another 50 sockeye were captured and trucked to a hatchery.

The hot, dry summer also led to a poor huckleberry crop, which increased the number of bear-human conflicts, Corsi said. A grizzly that wandered into the Coeur d’Alene drainage from the Cabinet Mountains was shot by a hunter. In Boundary County, another grizzly was killed in self-defense.

The conference, which continues Thursday, also includes sessions on regional efforts to prepare for a changing climate.

With a strong El Nino in the forecast, the Northwest will probably get another practice run at climate change in 2016, said Kathie Dello, associate director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute.

“It doesn’t look like it will be a great snow year, (though) it’s tough to be worse than last year,” she said. “I hope we get the snowpack, but don’t count on it.”