Paul O’Gorman: Extreme storm tracker
Several winters back, while shoveling out his driveway after a particularly heavy snowstorm, Paul O’Gorman couldn’t help but wonder: How is climate change affecting the Boston region’s biggest snow events? The question wasn’t an idle one for O’Gorman: For the past decade, he’s been investigating how a warming climate may change the intensity and frequency of the world’s most extreme storms and precipitation events. In 2014, O’Gorman decided to look into how increased warming may affect daily snowfall around the world. In a Nature study that has since been widely quoted, he reported that while most of the Northern Hemisphere will see less total snowfall in a warmer climate, regions where the average winter temperature is near a “sweet spot” will still experience severe blizzards that dump over a foot of snow in a single day. As it happened, the following winter in Boston produced consecutive blizzards that covered the city in a...