t’s been a brutal winter for many of us in the United States, especially those on the East Coast. At the time of this article’s publication, Boston was just two inches away from breaking its highest recorded annual snowfall total in history: a chilling 107.6 inches that fell in the winter of 1995-1996… The recent arrival of warmer weather in the East Coast and Midwest feels like a long-overdue reprieve for those of us who’ve spent the past few months entombed in snow and ice. But the truth is quite the opposite: We could use more snow. Especially in the springtime… More importantly, the historical trend lines are pretty clear. Since 1967, the amount of springtime snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere- where the vast majority of Earth’s snow falls- has decreased by about 1.6 percent every decade from the 1981-2000 average, according to a 2014 report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “The key is spring, as winter changes (and even fall) are not pronounced,” says David Robinson, New Jersey State Climatologist and a professor of geography at Rutgers.
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