Abstract (from http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/8/084009/meta): Record low snowpack conditions were observed at Snow Telemetry stations in the Cascades Mountains, USA during the winters of 2014 and 2015. We tested the hypothesis that these winters are analogs for the temperature sensitivity of Cascades snowpacks. In the Oregon Cascades, the 2014 and 2015 winter air temperature anomalies were approximately +2 °C and +4 °C above the climatological mean. We used a spatially distributed snowpack energy balance model to simulate the sensitivity of multiple snowpack metrics to a +2 °C and +4 °C warming and compared our modeled sensitivities to observed values during 2014 and 2015. We found that for each +1 °C warming, [...]
