Colorado mountain hail may disappear in a warmer future
Study shows less hail, more rain in region’s future, with possible increase in flood risk
Summertime hail could all but disappear from the eastern flank of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains by 2070, according to a new modeling study by scientists from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), NOAA and several other institutions.
Less hail damage could be good news for gardeners and farmers, said lead author Dr. Kelly Mahoney, a research scientist at CIRES, but a shift from hail to rain can also mean more runoff, which could raise the risk of flash floods.
“In this region of elevated terrain, hail may lessen the risk of flooding because it takes awhile to melt,” Dr. Mahoney said. “Decision makers may not want to count on that in the future.”
For the new study, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, Dr. Mahoney and her colleagues used “downscaling” techniques to try to understand how climate change might affect hail-producing weather patterns across Colorado.
The research focused on storms involving relatively small hailstones (up to pea-sized) on Colorado’s Front Range, a region that stretches from the foothill communities of Colorado Springs, Denver and Fort Collins up to the Continental Divide. Colorado’s most damaging hailstorms tend to occur further east and involve larger hailstones not examined in this study.
In the summer in Colorado’s Front Range above about 7,500 feet, precipitation commonly falls as hail. Decision makers concerned about the safety of mountain dams and flood risk have been interested in how climate change may affect the amount and nature of precipitation in the region.
Dr. Mahoney and her colleagues began exploring that question with results from two climate models, which assumed that levels of climate-warming greenhouse gases will continue to increase in the future, from about 390 ppm today to 620 ppm in 2070.
But the weather processes that form hail – thunderstorm formation, for example – occur on much smaller scales than can be reproduced by global climate models. So the team “downscaled” the global model results twice: first to regional-scale models that can take regional topography and other details into account (this step was completed as part of the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program.) Then, the regional results were downscaled to weather-scale models that can resolve individual storms and even the in-cloud processes that create hail.
Finally, the team compared the hailstorms of the future (2041-2070) to those of the past (1971-2000) as captured by the same sets of downscaled models. Results were similar in experiments with both climate models.
“We found a near elimination of hail at the surface,” Mahoney said.
In the future, increasingly intense storms may actually produce more hail inside clouds, the team found. However, because those relatively small hailstones fall through a warmer atmosphere, they melt quickly, falling as rain at the surface or evaporating back into the atmosphere. In some regions, simulated hail fell through an additional 1,500 feet (~450 m) of above-freezing air in the future, compared to the past.
The research team also found evidence that precipitation events over Colorado become more extreme in the future, while changes in hail may depend on the size of the hail stones - results that will be explored in more detail in ongoing work.
Dr. Mahoney’s postdoctoral research was supported by the PACE program (Postdocs Applying Climate Expertise) administered by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and funded by CIRES Western Water Assessment, NOAA, and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. PACE connects young climate scientists with real-world problems such as those faced by water resource managers.
Co-authors of the new paper, “Changes in hail and flood risk in high-resolution simulations over the Colorado Mountains,” include James Scott and Joseph Barsugli (CIRES/NOAA), Michael Alexander (NOAA/Earth System Research Laboratories) and Gregory Thompson (National Center for Atmospheric Research).
Kelly Mahoney, CIRES, 303-497-5616, kelly.mahoney@noaa.gov
Katy Human, CIRES, 303-735-0196, Kathleen.Human@colorado.edu