SEATTLE – Significant decline in snowpacks will present water-management challenges in the Northwest, according to a new report on global warming that points to the Columbia River Basin as one of the potential environmental issues faced in North America.
The report released Friday is the second of four coming this year from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations network of 2,000 scientists. It attempts to explain how global warming is changing life on Earth.
The document includes a section examining the effects of shrinking snowpacks on the Columbia River system, which is crucial to farming, fish and power generation, researchers said.
“Particularly for the irrigators, you’re looking at a worse summertime situation,” said Michael Scott, an economist with Richland-based Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Scott and seven researchers from the United States and Canada wrote the report’s North American chapter that highlights the Columbia River Basin.
Overall precipitation in the region is expected to stay the same through the end of the century. However, the snowpack will melt earlier and more rain will fall.
During winter and spring, Columbia River Basin flows would be higher, but markedly lower in the summer, when water is needed most for salmon, farmers and hydropower sales to California.
The report mentions the NcNary Dam, where water-flow targets are set to aid salmon. It states that by the 2090s, the current targets would be met only about 75 percent of the time.
Bonneville Power Administration markets the basin’s hydropower and is assessing effects of global warming and how to harvest the most from melting snowpacks.
As the snowpack shrinks, there should be ways to catch more of the winter runoff and hang on to it for the summer, said Scott Simms, a BPA spokesman.
Farmers and other major water users could also practice increased water conservation to help lessen effects forecast in the report, Scott said.
The report’s North American chapter also warns of global warming’s impact on wildfires and rising sea levels.
Earlier snowmelt and higher summer temperatures could dry out the landscape, setting up conditions for intense fires.
There’s already been a nearly sevenfold increase in total area burned in the West in the 16 years that ended in 2003, compared with the 16-year period that ended in 1986, the report states.
Meanwhile, researchers expect increased beach erosion, coastal flooding and other damage during high tides and storm surges, said Chris Field, director of the department of Global Ecology at Carnegie Institution and a co-author of the report.
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