Cascade Snowpack and AGW

A new paper from the University of Washington is getting some attention here in the Pacific Northwest:

A New Look at Snowpack Trends in the Cascade Mountains
Mark T. Stoelinga1, Mark D. Albright, and Clifford F. Mass

Basically it finds that the snowpack in the Cascade Mountains is influenced more by the northern Pacific Ocean than by greenhouse gas warming (and that the Pacific NW as a region is more influenced by its proximity to the Pacific Ocean and will not warm as much as the global average).

Key results are that the linear trend in the April 1 Cascade Mountain snowpack during the period 1930‐2007 was found to be ‐23%, although this trend does not quite meet a statistical significance threshold because of large interannual and interdecadal variability. The trend during the period 1950‐1997 (used by previous investigators) was found to be a statistically significant ‐48%. However, this trend is reduced to a statistically insignificant ‐14% when the part of the snowpack time series that correlates with an index of natural decadal variability of the north Pacific Ocean is removed. The observed Cascade snowpack actually shows a slight positive trend during the most recent 3 decades of rapid global warming, though this result does not achieve statistical significance due to the large annual variability in snowpack.

The paper is not yet peer-reviewed, but submitted to the Journal of Climate. Of course, it is already being politicized, with right wingers claiming (again) this is a disproof of anthropogenic global warming. It is not, as the authors make clear in their paper (p. 25).