Figure 4: Anomaly of annual maximum snow water equivalent and scaling factor β.
From: Large near-term projected snowpack loss over the western United States
(a) Anomaly in non-overlapping 5-year averages of annual maximum snow water equivalent (SWEmax). Solid black is ALL ensemble-mean and grey is 10–90% range (based on 50 ALL realizations). Solid blue line is NAT ensemble mean and dashed blue lines indicate the 10 and 90% values. The ALL and NAT curves are from CanESM2. The dashed black curve is from the 35-member set of CanRCM4 simulations with ALL forcing. Pink denotes the average of four reanalyses and green is the SnoTel observations. Anomalies are defined in Methods. (b) Scaling factor and 5–95% uncertainty range estimated from application of an optimal fingerprint method to SnoTel observations, reanalyses and CanESM2 simulation output (see Methods). Scaling factors greater than 0 and consistent with 1 indicate that a model-predicted SWEmax signal has been detected in observations and attributed to the imposed forcing changes in the ALL or NAT simulations.
