JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Snowpack in the West typically reaches its highest in early April, but that hasn't happened this year. Now drought persists across most of the region, setting up conditions for wildfires and low water supply. As Ellis Juhlin with Montana Public Radio reports, this abnormally warm and snowless winter points to a warming climate.
ELLIS JUHLIN, BYLINE: It's a classic spring day in Montana.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRDS CHIRPING)
JUHLIN: The birds are back.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER RUSHING)
JUHLIN: And in a small valley just outside Missoula, Marshall Creek is running high with snow melt.
KYLE BOCINSKY: It's very unusual that it feels spring-like in Missoula.
JUHLIN: This is Kyle Bocinsky. He works for the Montana Climate Office. Usually, runoff like this happens in early May. But it's late March, and he's surrounded by bare, muddy ground.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS SQUISHING)
JUHLIN: Bocinsky walks with state climatologist Kelsey Jencso at what used to be the base of a ski hill on Marshall Mountain. Jencso says people often ask him what Montana's climate future will look like.
KELSEY JENCSO: We're experiencing that this year. It's no longer in the future. This is climate change in Montana.
JUHLIN: This family-owned ski hill stopped operating in 2002. Bocinsky says that's because there wasn't enough consistent snow.
BOCINSKY: We've got a boarded-up ski area right in front of us that looks like a time capsule of the late '90s.
JUHLIN: There's still a faded lilac-colored chair lift and the old lodge building with a clock tower forever showing 4 p.m. Marshall closed after a particularly bad winter. This year, ski resorts across the West recorded some of their lowest snow totals in decades. Warmer winter temperatures put Montana and much of the western U.S. in a snow drought this year. That means snowpacks are below average across the region. Daniel Swain is a climate scientist with the California Institute for Water Resources.
DANIEL SWAIN: This was an astonishing heat event in that a large swath of the country experienced the warmest temperatures that have ever occurred in any March.
JUHLIN: The contiguous U.S. was nearly five degrees warmer this winter than the 20th century average. States including Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado had their warmest winter on record. Researchers involved with the World Weather Attribution found that the spring's heat waves would have been virtually impossible without climate change. Swain says those warmer March temperatures triggered an unprecedented collapse of the snowpack in most Western basins.
SWAIN: This is a shockingly bad snowpack, and the snowpack has now officially, in some of these basins, completely melted out.
JUHLIN: In a typical year, snowpack will remain at mid-to-high elevations well into the summer. An average snowpack acts like a natural water tower, slowly releasing water as it melts. That keeps rivers running high and reservoirs full. The snow melt that's happening now, Swain explains...
SWAIN: It's snow melt that can't happen later.
JUHLIN: This year's early runoff has saturated soils, lowering wildfire risk for some regions this spring. But Swain says...
SWAIN: That means that later in the summer, it's much more likely that the higher elevation forests will dry out as we get toward the middle or the end of the long, dry summer.
JUHLIN: But the lack of snow doesn't just mean a potentially busy wildfire year. Montana is the third largest grain-growing state in the country. A lot of the farms are dry land, meaning they rely entirely on the snow or rain to water crops. Jencso puts it this way.
JENCSO: And so we're to some degree betting on Mother Nature to provide enough water to get that crop to fruition.
JUHLIN: But whether farmers will have enough water remains a question. The National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center forecasts drought will expand in much of the western U.S. For NPR News, I'm Ellis Juhlin in Missoula, Montana.
(SOUNDBITE OF ZAYN SONG, "STARDUST") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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