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38˚ with rains melting away snow and ice cover increases risks with Water contamination new research suggests...

"...Scientists have long been aware of nutrient pollution during the warmer growing seasons. But now, they’re beginning to understand its effects during other times of the year. With climate change increasing winter temperatures, nutrient pollution during the winter has gone from “rare or nonexistent” to “far worse” than during other seasons, according to a statement.

“The assumption that discharge and nutrient transport remains low during the winter months no longer holds,” the researchers write in the paper. To reach this conclusion, the team zeroed in on so-called “rain-on-snow” events, or instances where rain falls on top of snow that’s already on the ground and causes it to melt.

They looked at flooding in the Mississippi River Basin in 2019 and found that winter rain-on-snow events sent huge amounts of sediment and nutrients into the Gulf of Mexico—much more pollution than a similar amount of rain in the warmer months would have caused.

“Winter events tend to carry a little bit more pollution than the same size event in the growing season,” says Carol Adair, an environmental scientist at the University of Vermont and one of the study’s authors, to KCUR’s Eva Tesfaye. “That's largely because there are no plants around taking things up.”

The infusion of nutrients into the gulf contributed to what’s known as a “dead zone,” which occurs when bacteria proliferate and remove too much oxygen from the water, causing fish and other marine wildlife to die off or leave the area. The 2019 Gulf of Mexico dead zone was the eighth largest in the gulf on record and spanned 6,952 square miles, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Though other factors were also at play, “consistent increases in winter floods, runoff and winter discharge” were likely big contributors to the massive dead zone, the researchers write in the paper." - To reach this conclusion, the team zeroed in on so-called “rain-on-snow” events, or instances where rain falls on top of snow that’s already on the ground and causes it to melt.

- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/once-frozen-chemicals-could-pollute-water-as-winters-warm-180980918/

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