Background
In the words of the author, "an understanding of the long-term characteristics of snowpack variability is useful for guiding expectations for future variability."  Especially is this so today, when climate alarmists are predicting increasing extremes in all kinds of meteorological phenomena, including precipitation (of which snowfall is an important component), in response to global warming.

What was done
Woodhouse generated a tree-ring based reconstruction of snow water equivalent (SWE) on 1 April of each year of the period 1569-1999 for the Gunnison River basin region of western Colorado.

What was learned
Was there anything unusual about this SWE record during the 20th century, a period that is typically described by climate alarmists as having experienced unprecedented warming with respect to the entire past millennium?  Yes, there was.   In the words of the author, "the twentieth century is notable for several periods that lack extreme years [our italics]."  Specifically, she notes that "the twentieth century is notable for several periods that contain few or no extreme years, for both low and high SWE extremes."  In addition, she reports that "the twentieth century also contains the lowest percent of extreme low SWE years."

What it means
These results are but another example of the fact that, if anything, warming tends to result in less extreme weather (see the many sub-categories of Weather Extremes in our Subject Index), in direct contradiction of the unfounded claims of the world's ever-so-vocal but ever-so-wrong climate alarmists.