El Nino making snow now, but climate change 'loads dice' for warmer future winters

he El Niño weather pattern that's fueling a snowy start to 2016 for the Lake Tahoe region is among the strongest on record and likely to continue bringing storms to the region.

But the long-term climate prognosis for the Sierra Nevada and the planet as a whole is more troubling with rising global temperatures threatening to make cold, snowy winters less likely in the future.

That was the message two climate scientists delivered Friday to an audience of meteorologists gathered for a conference at Lake Tahoe.

Alexander Gershunov, a climate and meteorology researcher at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, presented two models that showed the 2015-16 version of El Niño shaping up to be similar to conditions in 1982-83 and 1997-98, and maybe a little stronger.

"According to this, this particular El Niño is unprecedented on that record," he said of the stronger of the two models. "These three are in the same ballpark."

Under the five strongest El Niño patterns through history California and the Sierra Nevada tended to get more winter precipitation than normal. As much as 80 percent more along the Southern California coast and about 20 percent more in the Reno-Tahoe region.

Weaker El Niño events on record have produced drier winters for Reno-Tahoe.

Still, it doesn't necessarily mean the snowpack that's been a welcome break from the Sierra Nevada drought will continue piling high, Gershunov said.

That's because if the pattern brings warm, wet weather, it could generate rain instead of snow.

"I really hope it doesn't rain a lot on this snowpack," he said.

The presentation was part of Operation Sierra Storm, a national conference for television meteorologists sponsored by the Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority.

But when it comes to the sustainability of the Sierra snowpack there's more to it than a seasonal El Nino pattern.

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