Meteorologists say winters may be warmer, snowier. What is St. Paul doing to prepare?

Frederick Melo, Pioneer Press
·8 min read
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Heavy Midwest snows this season have stranded travelers, narrowed roads, forced St. Paul and Minneapolis to institute one-sided parking bans and generally made an icy, slushy muck out of travel.

Experts say this is the climatological future, though not every year.

“Our winter precipitation has been going up,” said Kenny Blumenfeld, a senior state climatologist with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. “We’re having a year with a lot of precipitation, and average to above average for temperatures. Even though this trend is going to continue, we’re still going to have some old-fashioned winters — maybe not as frequently as they used to be.”

In other words, Blumenfeld said, brace for wetter, heavier snowfalls in the years ahead than, say, 30 or 40 years ago, including some potential record-setters like the current one, interspersed with some winters like any other.

“Is this going to be the new normal? Winters like this are probably going to become increasingly common, increasingly normal,” he said. “Maybe instead of it happening once per decade, it will be two or three times per decade.”

80 inches of snow so far this year

With 80 inches of snowfall in the Twin Cities as of Monday, the season had already entered the books as the eighth-snowiest on record, and that was before fresh snow began falling Thursday.

In a state where weather patterns are nothing if not variable, experts acknowledge that forecasting future winter weather is an inexact science.

Nevertheless, engineers and climatologists say that Minnesota’s experience with snowfall and extreme weather in the past decade should be a wake-up call for city planners and those in public works departments.

Snowfall totals may be higher in many, though not all, winters ahead due to moisture captured in the atmosphere, according to the experts. And as snow accumulates, melts into cracks in the road and refreezes overnight, infrastructure suffers. Twin Cities drivers have already gotten an early taste of the bad pothole season ahead. Experts say to expect more bad pothole seasons to come.

“Cities in the future should be planning and budgeting for this,” said Manik Barman, an associate professor of engineering at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. “Plan for more preventative maintenance. If we wait until the road is not drivable anymore, then it’s a huge cost. If we do it in advance, it’s far less.”

St. Paul looks to the next 20 years

In St. Paul, the mayor’s office is in the early stages of putting together an internal task force to study how to prepare the city’s streets for future winters.

St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter has already proposed — with a majority of the city council’s blessing — tripling the local sales tax to 1.5% to raise nearly $1 billion over the next 20 years, with nearly $750,000 of it to be dedicated toward reconstructing 25 badly-potholed collector and arterial streets.

Among other considerations, the city likely will take a close look at hiring snowplow drivers, ticketing during snow emergencies and the appropriate supplies of sand, road salt and other types of chemical street treatments. The city, which averages about four snow emergencies each winter, had called seven emergencies as of Thursday, as well as a one-sided parking ban that runs through April 15.

“Winters in the future will look more like this winter than they will past winters from 25 years ago,” said St. Paul Public Works Director Sean Kershaw. “Whether or not people agree with climate change, the winters are changing — they’re became warmer, more temperature fluctuations, and for Minnesota, more moisture in the winter time. We need to be ready.”

Matt Saam, the Public Works director for the city of Apple Valley — which recorded some 20 inches of snow in one winter storm on Feb. 23 — said the city has already used nearly double the average amount of salt from the past four seasons, and salt is pricier than ever. Overtime spending in his department is up 18% over previous seasons, as well.

Apple Valley sent out crews to plow or de-ice roads at least 47 times this winter, up 34% compared to the recent average.

“I don’t think we’re at a point yet where we can say that this winter is the new normal,” said Saam, in an email. “If we start to see this winter repeated over the next few years, perhaps we’ll be in a different situation.”

Experts say it’s not just winters that are evolving. Heavy snowfall in the winter of 2018-19 led to widespread flooding for Mississippi River communities a few months later. That was followed in 2022 by historically-low river levels that paralyzed boats and barges around the world. On top of immediate impacts to everyday residents and industry, heatwaves, droughts and coastal flooding bite into city budgets.

A 2021 report from consultants with McKinsey and Company chronicled 15 ways that cities are adapting to changing weather patterns, from nature-based solutions — such as planting trees to provide shade and reduce erosion — to retrofitting infrastructure, which can be prohibitively expensive.

The report noted that vulnerable populations, such as children, the elderly, low-income communities and the disabled, may be at higher risk in a climate-related emergency.

A wetter winter

Given Minnesota’s warming winters, which are already averaging 5 degrees hotter than in 1970, a common assumption might be that the Twin Cities would get less and less snow and that it would melt increasingly quickly. Instead, the metro area is experiencing near-record snowfall this season, heavy accumulation and melt that freezes to ice overnight, complicating even a walk down the front steps.

Blumenfeld works and lives in St. Paul and sees the vagaries of Minnesota winter firsthand. This one, he acknowledges, has been a doozy.

“Our street has been hit really hard with the snow and ice,” said Blumenfeld on March 9, the day before the capital city’s one-sided parking ban took effect. “I get it. It’s personal.”

He and other experts say that globally, greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor are trapping heat in our atmosphere, which in turn traps moisture. The most dramatic temperature increases are happening at night and in northern, cold-climate regions like Minnesota, where an unusually warm winter can also mean a wetter winter.

“Most of the snow we’ve had this winter has been wetter than what we see in an average winter — real slushy,” Blumenfeld said. “We’ve also had an unusual number of days where it also rained, or only rained.”

‘There isn’t a very clear answer’

For Minnesota, the extra moisture and humidity has meant more frequent heavy snow events, experts say, and periods of sleet or rain that turns to ice overnight.

“While our winters are no doubt getting warmer on average, they are also featuring more variability in their temperature and precipitation patterns,” said Jason Furtado, an associate professor in the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, in an email.

“That means increased risks of extreme winter storms,” Furtado added. “With warmer winters also comes the ability for the atmosphere to hold more moisture that can be converted to precipitation in storms. In northern areas like where you are in Minneapolis/St. Paul, the winters are still cold enough for frozen precipitation, and with a ‘juiced up’ atmosphere, this means the potential for more heavy snowfall and even sleet/freezing rain.”

Despite a foreseeable uptick in wet and slushy snows, experts say it’s tough to forecast typical water ratios and snow density moving forward. The dry, powdery snow perfect for skiing, sledding and other winter sports isn’t necessarily a thing of the past. Snow conditions are impacted by multiple variables, including humidity near the ground.

“There isn’t a very clear answer to this,” Furtado said. “The type of snow that falls is a function of temperature and moisture in the atmosphere associated with a storm. … There is no clear evidence of trends in types of snowfall in the northern U.S.”

Slices of a pie

As part of the variability, climatologists say some winters will still feel like status quo from years gone by.

Imagine all of the possible winter scenarios taken together forming a pie, said Blumenfeld. One slice of the pie might be labeled “wet and snowy.” Another might be labeled “colder than average.” Yet another might be labeled “almost no snow at all.”

As weather patterns change, the slices dubbed “heavy snowfall” and “warmer than average” are getting bigger — as in, more frequent — but they haven’t entirely crowded out the other possible scenarios.

“We’re still going to have our winters where it doesn’t snow very much at all,” Blumenfeld said. “The slice of the pie that is a winter like this is getting bigger. There’s still other slices in that pie.”

Temperatures this season have been about average going back to 1991, but that’s still 5 degrees above where Minnesota winters stood before 1970, which is when climatologists noticed an increase. At this rate, Blumenfeld said winter temperatures will increase another 5 degrees by 2070, for a total 10-degree uptick over the course of the century.

And that’s an average. Some places in Minnesota — like International Falls, which calls itself the “Icebox of the Nation” — have already seen winter temperatures climb that much each January compared to the 1950s and ’60s. The very next month, temperatures drop again.

“February … has showed almost no warming trend,” Blumenfeld said. “On average, our winters have been getting warmer, and that’s going to continue. Even as we expect more warming in the future, we still have all of those normal ups and downs that have been part of Minnesota’s climate forever, and will continue to be part of Minnesota weather for the foreseeable future.”

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