Why are mountains warming faster than valleys?

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:05]What we see globally is that mountains are warming about 20% faster than the lowlands that surround them.

[00:00:13]And the reason for this are a couple.

[00:00:16]Um when we have conditions like this where the snow is melting off, you can see that the snow is quite bright and reflects >> [music] >> much of that uh radiation back up to the atmosphere. But the ground, the rocks, the vegetation is much darker. So, when we lose snow earlier in a a warming world, [music] we have more exposed soil. That soil then warms up and uh the temperature of the mountains rises faster than the lowlands where we haven't historically had all that snow.

[00:00:46]Also, if the system is getting dried out earlier in the year because the snow is disappearing earlier, then that drier soil is more likely to warm up and not evaporate water. The evaporation of the water cools the soil.

[00:01:01]So, if we have drier summers, we actually tend [music] to have warmer soils and warmer vegetation. So, the combination of snow melting, losing that albedo feedback, combined with drier summers have shown pretty large differences [music] with uh the lowlands. And we're concerned that these higher elevations supply so much of our water that elevation-dependent warming could have an impact on our future water supplies.