From an epic winter season to record breaking heat we’ve seen both extremes in Northern Nevada lately, and while 2019 turned out to be a good winter season, this does not represent our current climate situation as a whole.
"Tahoe city has a very long climate record, so we can see clearly long term temperatures increasing in association with more rain than snow falling at lake level,” said Adrian Harpold.
Climate is not defined by one event, it is more long term. A good analogy of climate versus weather is comparing it to students individual test scores versus their whole semester. So if you take a test and get an A, and then another A, followed by a D, that does not mean you're a bad student, it just means you got one bad grade.
"The shortest you might do that is would be like thirty years of climate. Climate could be looked at as millennial, thousands of years,” said Harpold.
However, there is no way to know for sure what next year will hold. It’s also especially difficult to predict in our region.
"The way that we do the statistics you're just as likely to get a wet year following a dry year and a dry year following a wet year,” said Harpold.
But our climate oftentimes does go in cycles.
"There are absolutely cycles in the climate and we relate a lot of them to sea surface temperatures and they go on scales of five to eight years to decades and longer," said Harpold.
While each one has been a little different, so far you could say we’ve had about three or four good snow seasons back and forth. Let’s hope our luck continues into next year.
