Attribution of the spring snow cover extent decline in the Northern Hemisphere, Eurasia and North America to anthropogenic influence

While it is generally accepted that the observed reduction of the Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover extent (SCE) is linked to warming of the climate system caused by human induced greenhouse gas emissions, it has been difficult to robustly quantify the anthropogenic contribution to the observed change. This study addresses the challenge by undertaking a formal detection and attribution analysis of SCE changes based on several observational datasets with different structural characteristics, in order to account for the substantial observational uncertainty. The datasets considered include a blended in situ-satellite dataset extending from 1923 to 2012 (Brown), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) snow chart Climate Data Record for 1968–2012, the Global Land Data Assimilation System version 2.0 (GLDAS-2 Noah) reanalysis for 1951–2010, and the NOAA 20th-century reanalysis, version 2 (20CR2) covering 1948–2012. We analyse observed early spring (March-April) and late spring (May-June) NH SCE extent changes in these datasets using climate simulations of the responses to anthropogenic and natural forcings combined (ALL) and to natural forcings alone (NAT) from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). The ALL-forcing response is detected in all of the observed records, indicating that observed changes are inconsistent with internal variability. The analysis also shows that the ALL-forcing simulations substantially underestimate the observed changes as recorded in the Brown and NOAA datasets, but that they are more consistent with changes seen in the GLDAS and 20CR2 reanalyses. A two-signal analysis of the GLDAS data is able to detect the influence of the anthropogenic component of the observed SCE changes separately from the effect of natural forcing. Despite dataset and modelling uncertainty, these results, together with the understanding of the causes of observed warming over the past century, provide substantial evidence of a human contribution to the observed decline in Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover extent.