During the winter of 1999/2000 there was less snow than usual over North America.
This images is a MODIS eight-day composite map showing the maximum snow cover from
March 5-12 2000.
- Snow is white
- non-snow covered land is green
- clouds are grey
- water is blue
The red line represents the "average" March snow line, and the
yellow line represents the "average" February snow line, as determined from NOAA/NESDIS
snow maps (1966-present).
Source: NASA |
The top graph shows an analyses of six
independent time series of melt dates in northern Alaska compared with the 1966-2000 Barrow (BRW) melt
date record. A 5-year smoothed time series and linear fits are shown. Each is correlated
with the NOAA/CMDL-BRW record (red) with coefficients indicated [in brackets]
for each of the sites. Notice that there is a trend to earlier melt dates at most of the sites. The map view of northern Alaska (bottom) shows the approximate locations
of the seven sites.
Source: adapted from Stone et al., 2001 and
NOAA.
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