Are you ready for a vacation? I am! While some meteorologists plan their vacations around storm-chasing in the Great Plains, I prefer to pick locations with good scenery and friends to share it with.  When I was a kid, my family drove across the northern US to visit friends in Alberta and see the Northern Rockies, including Glacier National Park plus Banff and Jasper National Parks in Canada. But since 1976, the climate in that region has changed and the glaciers in the mountains are not as prominent as they were when I was last there.

My friend Dr. Marshall Shepherd from UGA is taking his family out west to see Glacier National Park for himself while there are still glaciers there to see. And while not all glaciers are decreasing (since glacial growth is a combination of precipitation and temperature trends over time), many are slowly disappearing. So if you want to see glaciers in the US, now is a great time to go. You can read more in Marshall’s blog in Forbes at https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2018/06/13/why-our-vacation-is-to-glacier-national-park-it-really-is-losing-its-glaciers/#654115a7614e. I am also considering taking an Alaska cruise next year to see the glaciers there while I can.

By U.S. National Park Service – Archived link, Archived gallery, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=303160