Twenty-First-Century Projections of Snowfall and Winter Severity across Central-Eastern North America*,+

AbstractStatistically downscaled climate projections from nine global climate models (GCMs) are used to force a snow accumulation and ablation model (SNOW-17) across the central-eastern North American Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs) to develop high-resolution projections of snowfall, snow depth, and winter severity index (WSI) by the middle and late twenty-first century. Here, projections of a cumulative WSI (CWSI) known to influence autumn–winter waterfowl migration are used to demonstrate the utility of SNOW-17 results. The application of statistically downscaled climate data and a snow model leads to a better representation of lake processes in the Great Lakes basin, topographic effects in the Appalachian Mountains, and spatial patterns of climatological snowfall, compared to the original GCMs. Annual mean snowfall is simulated to decline across the region, particularly in early winter (December–January), leading to a delay in the mean onset of the snow season. Because of a warming-induced a...