Snow and ice storms

Overview

Winter storms bring snow, ice, and cold temperatures, which makes a huge impact on society and human beings.

Heavy snowfall is a substantial concern for cities, settlements and key transportation and energy infrastructure. Heavy snowfall can interfere with transportation and cause a loss of both work and school days depending on local snow removal infrastructure. Freezing rain and ice storms can be treacherous for road and air travel, and can knock down power and telecommunication lines if ice accumulation is high. Rain-on-snow events can create a solid barrier that hinders wildlife and livestock grazing that is important to indigenous communities. Shifts in the frequency, seasonal timing and regions susceptible to ice storms alter risks for agriculture and infrastructure.

Data

There are now very little studies on projection of heavy snowfall and ice storms separately in the future. This is because projection of winter storm in general requires resolution beyond the ones currently available for climate models, let alone the difficulty to separate snow and rainfall in the model. In stead, metrics of generally characterizing the storminess and storm track activity is available.

1.

Not much studies on projection of snow storm changes, like intensity, frequency, because of the resolution and it is hard to separate snow and precipitation.

There are projection of winter storm in general. Storminess, Storm track activity.

No data either. But CONUS 404 is in development. We may look forward to it.