It’s a classic spring day in Montana; the birds are back, and in a small valley just outside Missoula, Marshall Creek is running high with snowmelt.
"It's very unusual that it feels spring-like in Missoula."
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.
Bocinsky walks with state climatologist Kelsey Jensco at what used to be the base of a ski hill on Marshall Mountain. Pointing at the snowless slopes, Jensco says people often ask him what Montana’s climate future will look like.
"We're experiencing that this year," he says. "It's no longer in the future. This is climate change in Montana."
This family-owned ski hill stopped operating in 2002. Bocinsky explains that’s because there wasn’t enough consistent snow.
"We've got a boarded up ski area right in front of us that looks like a time capsule of the late '90s."
There’s still a faded-lilac colored chairlift, 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.
The warmer winter temperatures put Montana, and much of the West, in a snow drought this year. It means snowpacks are below average across the region.
Daniel Swain is a Climate Scientist with the California Institute for Water Resources.
"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," Swain says.
It’s Montana’s second 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.
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 snowmelt that’s happening now is snowmelt that can't happen later, Swain explains.
The early runoff has saturated soils, lowering wildfire risk for some regions this spring.
"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," Swain says.
But the lack of snow doesn’t just mean a potentially busy wildfire year.
Jensco says, "The problem is that water is leaving the system earlier than we would like it to."
Montana’s grain growing regions are mostly dryland operations, meaning they don’t irrigate, and rely entirely on the snow or rain to water crops. A lot of farms plant winter wheat, which grows underneath the buffer of snowpack. But that didn’t happen this year, Jensco says.
"What we're seeing in a lot of cases across rain-fed dryland areas of central and eastern Montana is the emergence of winter wheat."
Jensco says now that the winter wheat is exposed, "If we get a cold snap, it has the potential to damage that crop and reduce production."
Jensco is part of a team that assesses drought conditions across Montana every week. He says they’re already discussing how farmers will fare in the warmer months ahead.
The National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center forecasts drought will expand in most of the western U.S.
