Click the link to read the article on the Sky-Hi News website (Ryan Spencer). Here’s an excerpt:
February 23, 2026
Colorado’s record-low snowpack is already raising concerns about increased wildfire risk and water shortages this summer, even as the mountains are still in the depths of winter. Statewide, the snowpack levels are just 61% of median for this time of year, and it would take consistent, record-breaking snowfall for the rest of the season to reach normal peak snowpack levels, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“We really should be bracing for an unusually early and potentially severe fire season,” Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control public information officer Tracy LeClair said. “Some of the conditions are worse than we saw in the big years, like 2012 and 2020, where we saw some of the largest fires and some of the most destructive fires in Colorado history.”
Those historic fire seasons were preceded by winters with well-below-average snowpacks, LeClair said. But this winter season, the snowpack is the worst Colorado has seen in decades. For weeks, the state’s snow telemetry network, which dates back to about 1987, has ranked the snowpack as the worst on record.
Colorado Drought Monitor map February 17, 2026.
In the latest report from the U.S. Drought Monitor, parts of Summit, Eagle, Pitkin, Lake and Park counties were experiencing exceptional drought — the most intense level of drought. Meanwhile, most of northwest Colorado is under extreme drought or severe drought status…The snow drought that has persisted through the season has shifted the fire risk “into the late winter months,” LeClair said. She noted that lack of snow has also led fire agencies across the state to delay or cancel prescribed burn projects, like pile burns, which require snow on the ground to burn safely.
Mayor Mike Johnston today joined members of City Council in announcing it intends to file a moratorium on new data centers in Denver. The process, which is expected to last several months, will allow the city to review and strengthen regulations around the sites.
“Data centers power the technology we depend upon and strengthen our economy,” said Mayor Mike Johnston. “But as this industry evolves, so must our policies. This pause allows us to put clear and consistent guardrails in place while protecting our most precious resources and preserving our quality of life. Denver is pro-business and pro-climate, and I’m proud to partner with City Council in keeping Denver one of the top tech sectors in the country and doing so in a way that is responsible to our residents and the industries who wish to invest here.”
An ordinance announcing the moratorium will be filed by Council. If approved, the city will conduct a review of additional, data-center specific regulations around responsible land, energy, and water use as well as zoning and affordability for ratepayers. The city will launch a process that collaborates with members of the community, climate experts, and industry leaders to clarify guidance and create a policy that is practical, predictable, and transparent.
“Data centers bring with them a unique series of environmental challenges and neighborhood impacts,” said Councilman Paul Kashmann. “My office has been looking into this topic in depth in recent months. I believe the complexity of the issues involved merits our city taking a pause to give them adequate consideration. While there remains distance between the Mayor’s view and mine – as well as some other Council colleagues – I look forward to working with the administration, the community at large and industry voices to see if regulations – as have been instituted in sister cities around the country – will or will not make additional data center development possible in the City and County of Denver.”
Data centers provide significant economic impact through high-paying jobs and property tax revenue. They are also a necessary component of many aspects of our daily lives, from operating major sectors like healthcare, automotive, retail, and shipping to everyday tasks like sending an email, streaming a movie, or using an app on your phone.
“Denver is a city that embraces innovation. We are also committed to protecting our environment,” said Councilman Darrell Watson. “Data centers use significant energy and water. We have a responsibility to manage their growth in our communities wisely and sustainably. I will be introducing common sense legislation built on that premise. We can protect the health of Denver communities, strengthen our climate commitments, and continue to keep our city moving forward responsibly.”
Existing data centers and projects currently permitted or under construction are not impacted by this decision, though they may be expected to follow new guidelines once announced.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Brandon Loomis). Here’s an excerpt:
February 23, 2026
Key Points
A coalition of cities and water providers, led by the Central Arizona Project, has launched a media campaign targeting proposed Colorado River cuts.
The campaign includes a TV ad that claims Arizona “is being unfairly targeted” by some water management alternatives outlined in a federal document.
After the seven Colorado River states failed to reach an agreement on shortage sharing, the federal government turned to its own set of proposals.
A Central Arizona Project-backed advocacy group called the Coalition for Protecting Arizona’s Lifeline has begun rolling out television ads and online videos defending the water supplier’s rights to a Colorado River that is under serious hydrological and political strain.
“Arizona is being unfairly targeted for reductions of Colorado River water that would cripple our state, flatten our economy and weaken our nation’s defense,” an ad aired by the coalition warns. It goes on to note that Arizona communities have done their part, committing more water for conservation in Lake Mead than those in other states, and that several options that the federal government is weighing for managing the river would fall hardest on the state.
One such alternative under review, CAP General Manager Brenda Burman recently said, would essentially dry up the agency’s canal from the river to Phoenix and Tucson…The alternatives Burman was referring to were never stated as the Trump administration’s preference, but rather as ideas from which the seven states that share the river water might draw from in writing an agreement for sharing in its worsening shortages. Now that the states have failed to reach such an agreement, though, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is faced with either enacting something like them or rapidly developing a new federal plan in time to replace river guidelines that expire this autumn…While the materials don’t directly state members’ intended method of securing water, some of the videos lean heavily on the so-called Law of the River and its guarantee of water from the four headwaters states to Arizona, California and Nevada. This theme reiterates a point that CAP and Arizona water officials have stressed over the last year or so, that if push comes to shove in a legal battle, they have the 1922 Colorado River Compact on their side.
“The Lower Basin has paper water, uses wet water, and wants the Upper Basin to deliver ghost water” — Kevin Pilgrim
Water levels were low at Lake Powell’s Wahweep Marina in November 2021. Recent worst-case projections from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation show the reservoir declining below power pool by July. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The Colorado River crisis is no longer part of some hypothetical future — it’s here.
Fueled by one of the worst snowpacks on record, the “most probable” February projection from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation estimates 5 million acre-feet flowing into Lake Powell this year, which is 52% of average. A more grim estimate puts that number at just 3.5 million acre-feet, or 37% of average.
Forecasts show the nation’s second-largest reservoir could fall below the minimum level needed to make hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam as soon as July under the worst-case scenario, or by December under the “most probable” forecast. Reservoir levels are projected to fall to their lowest elevation on record in March 2027, threatening the water supply for millions in the Southwest.
But the increasingly dire projections, this winter’s historically bad snowpack and the growing gap between supply and demand haven’t yet pushed the seven states that share the river to come to an agreement on its future management.
Last week, state negotiators blew past a second federally set deadline to find a consensus plan on how to share shortages and manage Lake Powell and Lake Mead after the current guidelines expire at the end of the year. They have been stuck at an impasse for two years.
The need for a new management paradigm that adapts to a shrinking water supply has never been more urgent. So why isn’t the crisis forcing a deal?
“We’re at a moment where we really need something different that responds to our current hydrology, our current demands, and we’re not seeing a development of that kind,” said Elizabeth Koebele, a professor of political science and associate director of the graduate program of hydrologic sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno. “You’d think that all of these signals would be pointing to the fact that we really need to do something different, but we’re not.”
Anne Castle, a former federal representative to the Upper Colorado River Commission and a Colorado River expert, co-authored a paper in 2021 that said successful negotiations of new Colorado River agreements tend to be triggered by very dry conditions, and that federal directives and deadlines also play an important role. But the current stalemate amid worsening drought throws those findings into question.
“Our premise was that a crisis in terms of water supply and reservoir levels and snowpack and expected runoff can prompt creative compromise,” Castle said. “But we have all those underlying conditions, and we don’t have a compromise.”
The scale of the problem could be part of what’s making consensus difficult between the Upper Basin (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) and the Lower Basin (California, Arizona and Nevada). As a junior water user on the river, the Central Arizona Project, which supplies the metro Phoenix and Tucson areas, could face the deepest cuts.
“I think if this had been a 2 million-acre-foot problem, the states probably could have solved it, but it’s potentially a 4 million-acre-foot problem,” said Kathryn Sorensen, a researcher and professor at Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy. “There’s so little water to go around that positions have become hardened as a result. We’re not just talking about inconvenient cuts; we’re talking about severe pain to economies at this point.”
Federal involvement
Some of the normal levers that have been pulled to force action in the past — such as directives and deadlines from the federal government — don’t seem to be effective in the current situation. There have been no apparent consequences for the states missing both the Feb. 14 deadline and an initial Nov. 11 deadline set by the feds for the states to present the outline of an agreement.
The seven state negotiators and their governors were summoned to Washington, D.C., the last week of January for a meeting with Department of Interior officials. That, too, failed to result in a deal.
In a Feb. 14 news release, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum thanked the governors for their engagement and said a fair compromise with shared responsibility remains within reach.
Koebele said when the states were hashing out the 2007 guidelines, which currently govern the river and are just months from expiring, the threat of federal action was part of what spurred the states to come up with a plan.
“There’s a little bit less of this idea of a single or central federal leader in the negotiation process,” Koebele said. “And they’re also still saying, ‘Hey, states, please come up with your own option too.’ I’m not really sure how credible threats are from the federal government when we’re in this sort of context.”
Reclamation has presented five options for managing the river, but although the federal government owns and operates the infrastructure such as dams and reservoirs, it doesn’t have the authority to implement all of the actions outlined in the options. The new, innovative and collaborative actions would need an agreement among the states.
Absent that, federal officials believe the only tools at their disposal, which allocate cuts based on prior appropriation and existing water law, could see Arizona take up to 77% of total shortages, yet they “may not provide adequate protection of critical infrastructure or the system and may be viable only in the short term given current reservoir conditions,” according the bureau.
The federal management options are part of a draft environmental impact statement, which is required as part of the National Environmental Policy Act review for new guidelines. This process is moving forward on a separate, parallel track to negotiations among the states. If the states agree on a plan, it could be plugged into the EIS and become the “preferred alternative.”
“We’re sort of at a key moment for those two processes coming together,” Koebele said. “But the EIS and the state negotiations are not really intersecting in a way that we have seen them intersect in the past or that we hoped they would.”
Federal officials are accepting comments on the draft EIS until March 2.
Lake Pleasant, seen in April 2025, is a storage bucket for Colorado River water and is part of the Central Arizona Project that delivers water to the Phoenix and Tucson areas. According to one river management option from the federal government, Arizona would take the majority of shortages in dry years. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Blame to go around
In a series of news releases on February 13, 2026Upper Basin and Lower Basin officials blamed each other for the continuing standoff.
“We’re being asked to solve a problem we didn’t create with water we don’t have,” Colorado’s representative, Becky Mitchell, said in a prepared statement. “The Upper Division’s approach is aligned with hydrologic reality, and we’re ready to move forward.”
The crux of the issue is who should take shortages in drought years. The Lower Basin has committed to 1.5 million acre-feet of reductions annually and wants cuts beyond that to be shared by the Upper Basin. The Upper Basin says their water users already take cuts in some years because streams run dry by midsummer and any contributions they make through conservation must be voluntary.
Water managers upstream of Lee’s Ferry would note that they were promised an equal amount of water as the Lower Basin was in the 1922 Colorado River Compact, although they use about 4 million acre-feet a year, while the Lower Basin — whose flows are backed up by releases from the country’s two largest reservoirs — regularly uses all of the annual 7.5 million acre-feet to which it’s entitled. The Lower Basin’s position points to its larger population and economic output, and that their water users, already subject to mandatory cutbacks, tend to be more aggressive in their conservation measures.
“It’s the fundamental disagreement that we’ve had for the past many years,” Castle said. “The Upper Basin doesn’t want to agree to any enforceable reductions in use. And that is something that the Lower Basin, and Arizona in particular, don’t feel like they can live with.”
The states appeared to be on the verge of a breakthrough last summer, when representatives from both basins indicated a willingness to consider a supply-driven approach, where reservoir releases are more directly tied to the natural flow of the river. But hashing out the details is complicated, and a plan that all parties can agree to has yet to emerge.
Note the dotted red line. If says that it’s possible that power production at Glen Canyon Dam could end by August.
A new management plan would need to be in place by the start of the new water year on Oct. 1. And if the states can’t reach an agreement by then, the federal government will impose its own management rules, doling out cutbacks that could trigger lawsuits from the states but would not go far enough to prevent the system from crashing.
Even if the states come to an eleventh-hour agreement, federal action will be needed in the immediate future to protect levels at Lake Powell and the ability to produce hydropower. The dire projections showing Powell dropping below minimum power pool assume that the feds would release 7.48 million acre-feet from Powell this year, but under a short-term agreement that also expires at the end of the year, they could reduce releases down to as little as 6 million acre-feet. The Bureau of Reclamation is also holding back about 600,000 acre-feet in Lake Powell through April, which will be released later in the year.
The last time Lake Powell was projected to drop below system-critical thresholds after the 2021 spring runoff, Reclamation conducted emergency releases from upstream reservoirs. The chance that the bureau will again release additional water from those federally controlled reservoirs — Flaming Gorge, Blue Mesa and Navajo — to boost Powell in the coming months is “about 100%,” according to Colorado River expert and author Eric Kuhn.
“Just how much is going to be up in the air, but right now, it looks like they need a million to a million-and-a-half acre-feet based on the current projections,” Kuhn said.
John Fleck, an author, writer and University of New Mexico professor, was the co-author with Castle on the 2021 paper, titled “Green Light for Adaptive Policies on the Colorado River.” He said that in previous negotiations, state representatives not only had a sense of responsibility to protect water for their own communities, but were also looking out for the health of the entire interconnected basin.
“What we have seen in the last few years is a shift to a leadership that is made up of people who are solely looking out for the interests of their own community,” Fleck said.
Experts say the Colorado River needs a new and different management plan that responds to dwindling flows, rebuilds reservoir storage and creates a resilient system in the face of climate change. The current leadership is failing to provide that, Fleck said. The solution is a shift in mindset for water managers to start playing not for the Upper Basin or Lower Basin, but for Team Colorado River Basin, he said.
“There’s a moral question involving the obligations we have to one another in shared river basins,” Fleck said. “I would not be at all happy to win the litigation and see the Central Arizona Project shut down. I would see that as a failure even though my community’s water supply might be protected.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Florida’s barrier reef is in trouble – and it’s costing us.
The reef has been experiencing a severe outbreak of stony coral tissue loss diseaseover the past decade. The likely cause: stress from the warming climate and acidifying waters, both the result of burning fossil fuels.
The financial stake of losing the reef is high. Florida’s coral reefs are estimated to draw in over $1 billion in tourism revenue each year, provide $650 million in flood protection benefits, and support over 70,000 jobs. What’s more, coral reefs protect people and property by dissipating up to 97% of wave energy, lessening storm surges.
A new study in Nature Climate Change looks at such costs worldwide, estimating the total price of climate-change-related damage to the world’s oceans. The study concludes that accounting for ocean impacts nearly doubles the estimated climate costs to society, known as the social cost of carbon.
But as with most climate impacts, these costs are unequally borne, most heavily by people in poorer island nations and in other coastal regions like Florida. And as with all climate threats, they are being wholly ignored by the Trump administration.
‘A missing piece’
Earth’s oceans play a critical and often overlooked role in the health and well-being of people and cultures around the world. The average person consumes nearly one pound of seafood per week, which provides important dietary nutrients. Coastal ecosystems like mangrove forests and coral reefs also protect coastal communities against storm surges, a growing threat as a result of rising sea levels and climate-intensified storms.
But these benefits, which are threatened by climate change, are difficult to quantify. And when they’re not quantified, they’re left out of experts’ estimates of the damages we incur by burning fossil fuels and releasing climate-warming carbon dioxide – the social cost of carbon.
As a result, even when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency updated the federal estimate of the social cost of carbon in 2023 to nearly four times its previous value, the agency noted that this was likely still an “underestimate [of] the damages associated with increased climate risk.”
Climate impacts in the oceans in particular have been “a big missing piece recognized by every major assessment” of the social cost of carbon, said Bernie Bastien-Olvera, a climate scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in an email. He is the lead author of the new Nature Climate Change study.
Climate change’s one-two ocean punch
Human burning of fossil fuels affects Earth’s oceans via the one-two punch of warming and acidifying waters, which occurs as carbon dioxide is absorbed into the ocean. The oceans are about 40% more acidic today than they were before the Industrial Revolution.
1850–2025 global average sea surface temperature. (Data: UK Met Office Hadley Centre. Graphic: Dana Nuccitelli);
1985–2024 global average surface seawater pH. (Data: EU Copernicus Marine Service. Graphic: Dana Nuccitelli)
The falling pH of the oceans makes it more difficult for certain marine species, like shellfish and coral, to build their shells or skeletons. As a result of this combination of changing pH and heat, there have been four global mass coral bleaching events since 1998. These events indicate extreme stress and life-threatening conditions for coral reefs, upon which approximately one-quarter of all marine life relies for food, shelter, and breeding grounds.
The new study found that island nations, whose very existence is often threatened by rising sea levels, are “disproportionately affected” by the impacts of climate change on the oceans.
For example, about one-third of the world’s tuna catch comes from a group of 14 Pacific island nations. Fees associated with tuna fishing access account for about one-third of their government revenue, tuna fishing supports tens of thousands of jobs in the region, and tuna are an important dietary staple in these cultures.
But a 2021 study led by Conservation International’s Senior Director of Tuna Fisheries Johann Bell estimated that as warming oceans cause tuna to migrate away from this region, catches could be reduced by as much as 20% by 2050. Some Pacific Island coastal communities already “have trouble catching enough coral reef fish for food security,” Bell wrote via email. That’s the result of a combination of ocean warming and acidification, as well as human population growth.
The new Nature Climate Change study found that the loss of omega-3 fatty acids, calcium, iron, and protein from seafood-depleted diets would have significant negative effects on the health of populations that rely on these dietary sources. For example, the authors note that “a full intake of omega-3 fatty acids reduces risk of cardiovascular diseases by 7% relative to a diet poor of omega-3 fatty acids.”
Overall, these health impacts account for about half the study’s new estimated social cost of carbon from ocean impacts. Most of the rest stems from the loss of corals and mangroves, and the benefits they provide in terms of protecting coastal communities like Florida’s from increasingly severe storm surges, for example.
The Trump EPA buries its head in the eroding sand
Despite the ever-improving understanding of the immense damages associated with unabated climate change, the EPA in 2026 has strayed even further from evidence-based reality.
Although federal agencies are required by law to consider the costs and benefits of proposed regulations, the Trump EPA reportedly plans to stop assessing gains resulting from the health benefits of its air pollution rules. And the agency continues to move forward with its efforts to dismantle federal climate pollution regulations altogether, effectively treating the social cost of carbon as $0, compared to the nearly $400 per ton that would result from the combination of the EPA’s 2023 estimate and the new study’s estimated ocean damage costs to society.
But the new research still offers important value and insights.
“The way I see it, there are many other countries in the world (or even state/local governments within the U.S.) that can benefit from having better estimates of the social cost of carbon that rely on our best science and economics recognizing the oceans,” Bastien-Olvera said.
And a future administration and EPA could potentially reintroduce climate regulations and pollution cost-benefit analyses. Accounting for a nearly doubled social cost of carbon pollution could justify more stringent future climate rules.
“I hope that this metric proves useful for future U.S. governments,” Bastien-Olvera said.
The fate of island nations and Florida’s coastline alike may depend on it.
Dark Skies Over Bears Ears, Valley of the Gods, Utah, This photo was taken late at night in the middle of the desert. Over the Fourth of July, I traveled to Southeast Utah to interview people and take some final light readings in Blanding and Monticello Utah while working for the State of the Rockies Project Dark Skies Team. The whole summer I had been trying to get a reading within the “no visible light” range. This night I was able to do so. It was so dark that my light meter didn’t even work, but once I switched out my lens to a fisheye, the whole sky appeared on my camera in front of me. For me, this image represents something I had been looking for all summer. I had heard people speak about the sky in Bears Ears and why it was so worth protecting, but to see the stars for myself was something else entirely. Photo by Megan O’Brien, ’25
Mountain West Voters Show Growing Concerns Over PublicLand Protections Heading into 2026 Elections
State of the Rockies Project survey shows tension over direction of land management andenergy priorities, and desire for conservation of scarce water resources and public lands.
COLORADO SPRINGS—Results from Colorado College’s 16th annual State of the Rockies Project Conservation in the West Poll released today show widespread concern among Western voters about rollbacks of protections for land, water, and wildlife and cuts to funding for public land management.
The poll, which surveyed voters in eight Mountain West states—Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—found that Western voters across party lines are prioritizing conservation, recreation, and renewables over fossil fuel development heading into this year’s midterm elections.
Highlights from the Poll
84% of Western voters say that the rollback of laws that protect our land, water, andwildlife is a serious problem, a sharp increase from prior years.
85% of respondents say issues involving public lands, waters, and wildlife are important in deciding whether to support a public official.
86% of Western voters deem funding cuts to public lands a serious problem, including 76% of Republicans.
70% of respondentsoppose fast-tracking oil, gas and mining projects on national public lands by reducing environmental reviews and local public input.
72% of Westerners prefer expanding renewable energy over drilling and mining for more fossil fuels.
76% of Western voters—more Western voters than ever before—say they would prefer their member of Congress to place more emphasis on conservation and recreationon public lands over maximizing energy production.
74% of Western voters oppose selling some national public lands for oil and gas development.
91% of Western voters say existing national monument designations should be kept in place.
As policymakers look ahead to the upcoming midterm elections, 85% of voters in MountainWest states say issues involving public lands, waters, and wildlife are important indeciding whether to support a candidate.
“At a time of growing pressure on land and water in the West, the call to action from voters is clear and bipartisan: Westerners want funding and stewardship for public lands and natural resources, ” said Ian Johnson, Director of Strategic Initiatives & Sustainabilityat ColoradoCollege.
Voters want to prioritize renewable energy sources. When asked to prioritize energy sources, voters across party lines selected solar as their top choice, while coal was the least desired, with only 7% of respondents listing coal as a first or second priority.
Funding cuts to public land management have proven unpopular with Western voters. Recent funding cuts have reduced the number of firefighters, park rangers, scientists, and other employees working to protect public lands, water, and wildlife over the last year. These cuts to public land management have 86% of voters across party lines concerned, including 75% of MAGA supporters.
Western voters also oppose the sale of public lands and the elimination of public landprotections. Even with rising housing costs, 76% of Western voters oppose selling public lands for housing. Additionally, 74% of Western voters oppose selling public lands to private companies for oil, gas, and mining development.
Scarce water resources continue to be a concern for Westerners, particularly in states that have experienced droughts. Westerners consider scarce water resources a serious problem, with 87% of Western voters concerned about inadequate water supplies. Accordingly, 83% of voters in states along the Colorado River or its tributaries would support an agreement requiring all states to reduce their use of the Colorado River to preserve its health. This emphasis on water protection is particularly salient, as 80% of Westerners say data centers are a threat to water quality and supply in the West.
This is the sixteenth consecutive year Colorado College gauged the public’s sentiment on public lands and conservation issues. The 2026 Colorado College Conservation in the West Poll is a bipartisan survey conducted by Republican pollster Lori Weigel of New Bridge Strategy and Democratic pollster Miranda Everitt of Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates. The survey is funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
The poll surveyed at least 400 registered voters in each of eight Western states (AZ, CO, ID, MT, NV, NM, UT, & WY) for a total 3,419-voter sample, which included an over-sample of Black and Native American voters. The survey was conducted between January 2-18, 2026 and the effective margin of error is +2.4% at the 95% confidence interval for the total sample; and at most +4.9% for each state. The full survey and individual state surveys are available on the State of the Rockies Project website.
About Colorado College
Colorado College is a nationally prominent four-year liberal arts college that was founded in Colorado Springs in 1874. The College operates on the innovative Block Plan, in which its 2,200 undergraduate students study one course at a time in intensive three and a half-week segments. For the past eighteen years, the college has sponsored the State of the Rockies Project, which encourages students to conduct interdisciplinary investigations around the region to build on and deepen what we know about the challenges we face living in the Rocky Mountain West, and what to do about them.
About Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates
Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates (FM3)—a national Democratic opinion research firm with offices in Oakland, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon—has specialized in public policy oriented opinion research since 1981. The firm has assisted hundreds of political campaigns at every level of the ballot—from President to City Council—with opinion research and strategic guidance. FM3 also provides research and strategic consulting to public agencies, businesses and public interest organizations nationwide.
About New Bridge Strategy
New Bridge Strategy is a Colorado-based, woman-owned and operated opinion research company specializing in public policy and campaign research. As a Republican polling firm that has led the research for hundreds of successful political and public affairs campaigns, New Bridge has helped coalitions bridging the political spectrum in crafting winning ballot measure campaigns, public education campaigns, and legislative policy efforts.
About Hispanic Access Foundation
Hispanic Access Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, connects Latinos with partners and opportunities to improve lives and create an equitable society. Our vision is that one day every Hispanic individual in America will enjoy good physical health and a healthy natural environment, a quality education, economic success, and civic engagement in their communities with the sum of improving the future of America. For more information visit http://www.hispanicaccess.org.
If drought conditions do not significantly improve by the end of the winter, the city of Aspen may enter a stage 3 water shortage for the first time. The city’s drought response committee is anticipating recommending a stage 3 water shortage declaration based on the latest snowpack, drought data and outlooks for Aspen and the Roaring Fork watershed, according to an informational memo sent to Aspen City Council this week. But the city is hoping for more precipitation to stave off more stringent water restrictions, Megan Killer, a plans review technician with the city’s water department, said.
“We are hoping to see more precipitation in the coming months and this memo serves to raise awareness that we are seeing record low snow accumulation and much higher than average temperatures, and if things do not significantly change, we might have to increase water restrictions,” Killer told the Aspen Daily News in an email.
If the city were to enact stage 3 water restrictions, it would use its drought mitigation response plan, which was adopted in July 2020. It outlines restrictions the city could enforce to conserve water under different stages of water shortages. The declaration indicates extreme drought. Under stage 3 water restrictions, irrigation of existing lawns could be limited to one day per week based on a customer’s address. Athletic fields, trees and golf course greens could be irrigated by a mandatory schedule or water budget only. Car washing and filling or refilling of water features and swimming pools may not be allowed. Under those conditions, the city would “work to sustain mature trees to the extent possible but recognizes that there may be a major loss of lawns, gardens, some trees and some shrubs,” the plan says. The city also may pursue supply-side response measures, including operating its physically available senior water rights to divert water, “even though they deplete the decreed instream flow,” according to the plan.
Glen Canyon downstream from Glen Canyon Dam. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
February 17, 2026
Sitting in the audience at the Colorado Water Congress in January, I was reminded of the days, weeks and months after 9/11. The impulse –– fueled by rage, was to punch back — at somebody, somewhere. The result, as we saw in Afghanistan after 20 years and three presidents, was far from satisfying. Osama bin Laden died, but the Taliban prevailed.
At the conference, a new state legislator from the Western Slope was full of righteous indignation about the Colorado River dispute. Colorado and other upper basin states were right, and those in the lower basin were wrong. We will prevail in court, he insisted. That would be the Supreme Court, where all disputes among states must go. And Colorado, legislators had been told, is preparing for just that possibility.
Much is at stake here. It’s not just ranches on the Western Slope but nearly all the water rights allocated since 1922. Roughly half of water for Front Range cities comes from the Colorado River headwaters and for towns on the eastern plains as far east as Fort Morgan. The mountains towns at the Colorado River headwaters, most of their water rights are post-1922. The list goes on and one.
No wonder Colorado has its fur up.
Speaking later in the morning, Jim Lochhead, a figure prominent in Colorado water affairs since the 1970s, did not disagree with Colorado’s fundamental position.
Colorado insists that Arizona and California, especially, have caused the big reservoirs, Powell and Mead, to decline. The states — together, with Nevada, they constitute the lower basin — have reduced their water use substantially since 2002 — but not in proportion to the declines caused by warming temperatures and declining snowfall. The lower-basin states created the problem of the reservoirs now at perilously low levels. They bear the heaviest burden of refilling reservoirs by simply agreeing to take less water.
Lochhead also warned of inflexibility. “The upper basin cannot bail out the lower basin,” he said. “But (negotiators) have to be given room to compromise.”
“If the negotiators are forced to focus only on protecting what each of them thinks is legally theirs on paper, they can’t work on identifying and building the tools and strategies needed to make sure we can get away from crisis management and secure our future,” he said that January morning in Aurora.
Upper-basin states say that because they are at the headwaters, they have nothing equivalent to Powell and Mead upstream to provide certainty. If it rains and snows, there is water. If not, then water users have less or none. Colorado water officials say some with water rights dating to the 1880s have already had to go without.
My kids and their friends built a small terrain park in front of their house near Sloans Lake after the March 2003 St. Patrick’s Day blizzard.
The year 2002 was seminal. Modest snowfall was followed by an early and unusually warm spring. Peak runoff was barely noticeable. In Denver, a city that gets half its water from the Colorado River headwaters, sprinklers were turned off, green grass turned brown. Aurora, also heavily dependent upon Colorado River water, was within a few months of crisis in 2003 when a miracle occurred –– three feet of snow on St. Patrick’s Day.
Downstream in Arizona and California, far from this drama in the headwaters, life continued with no fear and little change. The upstream reservoirs, Powell and Mead, had water.
We have another dry year, and the Colorado River right now is expected to deliver less than the 3.8 million acre-feet at Lee Ferry, just below Glen Canyon Dam, than it did in 2002. Flows were 17 to 18 million acre-feet in the 1920s, when the Colorado River Compact was created and adopted. The long-term average was less, 14.6 to 15.1 million acre-feet. In this century, it has dipped to 12.1 to 12.5 million acre-feet. Some expect this trend to continue amid the warming and drying now underway in the basin. Might it go below 10 in a few more decades?
The lower basin until relatively recently used 10 to 11 million acre-feet. As for the upper basin, states — Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico, in addition to Colorado —they have used 3.5 to 4.5 million acre-feet. It depends upon whether it snows.
The end of a boat ramp in Antelope Canyon was high above the water of Lake Powell in May 2022, and water levels have dropped more now. Photo/Allen Best
“Everyone knows Lake Powell is now in a dire situation,” said Lochhead in a panel after the state legislators had left. “We have gone from 86% full to I think around 25% full today. Powell is in danger of being over a million acre-feet below deadpool next year. That should scare all of us.”
Deadpool is when the water level in a dam-created reservoir drops so low that water cannot be released and used for drinking, irrigation and power. In the last several years, at least one book, Zak Podmore’s Life After Dead Pool, has been written about the Colorado River with that threshold in mind. Other books and thousands and thousands of newspaper, magazine and website postings have mentioned it.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
Lochhead warned against hardened positions that put the Colorado River problems in front of the Supreme Court. Colorado has not fared well in water cases there the last 100-plus years.
For several decades, Lochhead was a water attorney for Holland and Hart, working from an office across from the post office in Glenwood Springs. It was a good place to raise a family of skiers, he once told this writer.
During that time on the Western Slope, Lochhead represented Colorado on Colorado River affairs in several capacities. Then, from 2010 until 2023, he was CEO of Denver Water, the state’s largest water utility. In the last few years, his life has been lower profile. But, as his remarks at the Water Congress demonstrated, he is still paying close attention.
Litigation in the Colorado River Basin, said Lochhead, is a “worst-case scenario, resulting in economic and political disruption and uncertainty no matter the outcome.” This message, he said, would be the same whether given to audiences in Arizona or Colorado.
“There are tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer dollars that will be spent on litigation over a 10- or 20-year period, and the outcomes will be uncertain. The upper basin has a lot of good arguments, and so does the lower basin.”
Colorado appeared before the Supreme Court in 1907. It claimed full use of the Arkansas River. The Supreme Court disagreed.
Delphus Carpenter. Picture courtesy Colorado State University library
In 1922, Colorado lost to Wyoming in a case involving the North Platte River. Colorado has insisted upon prerogatives because it was the source of the water. That defeat caused Colorado’s lead negotiator, Delph Carpenter, to conclude it must shelve the idea that being at the headwaters would trump the claims of downstream states on the Colorado River. Carpenter became the most important figure in crafting the Colorado River Compact of 1922.
“But of course, litigation under the compacts continued, and Colorado was ordered to pay some $34 million to Kansas in 2001 and to dry up Bonnie Reservoir and undertake the process of drying up 25,000 acres of farmland in the Republican River Basin,” Lochhead continued.
The headwaters of Whiskey Creek, between Minturn and Avon, in the Eagle River Valley, had plentiful snow in the mid-1990s. Photo/Allen Best
Lochhead described several layers of complexities.
“This isn’t litigation just between two or three states. This is litigation between four states that have a common obligation under the compact (the Upper Basin) versus three other states requiring coordination on strategy, negotiating remedies and settlement between the states,” he said.
Nor is it simple a matter of the two basins, upper and lower, in conflict. The 30 federally recognized tribes in the Colorado River Basin have their interests, and they are not all the same. They also have rights that in most cases supersede those of the states. Public interest groups can have different interests. And, if the federal government makes the decisions about future uses of the Colorado, each and all may “sue the federal government over any unilateral federal action or decision, and that litigation can take all kinds of different forms.”
“Other entities may seek to intervene in the litigation. The United States certainly would, as we have seen in Texas versus New Mexico. But when tribes seek to intervene, if the country of Mexico seeks to intervene — what happens during litigation?”
Mexico, under a 1944 compact, is to get 1.5 million acre-feet annually.
Plus, the three other upper-basin states may disagree with Colorado. Colorado uses by far the most water of the four, as a compact among them reached in 1948 specified. Alone, though, it has pushed that limit.
In other words, going to water war sounds vaguely patriotic. The reality of the courtroom may be less heart-thumping.
Boulder has very good water rights but depends somewhat on imported Colorado River water. Photo/teofilo and Wikimedia Commons
Consider what if Colorado did lose? Here’s where the story gets grim. The Front Range cities, the ski towns, even farmers in the South Platte and Arkansas valleys to the Nebraska and Kansas borders.
Lochhead described the stakes involved, the gamble of letting the black-robed justices in D.C. decide the fates of the seven base states. “Do we find ways to work together across the basin to address the crisis together?”
He asked that question more than two weeks before Valentine’s Day, the deadline set by the Bureau of Reclamation without obvious irony. Without agreement by the seven states about how to share the diminished river, it is now up to the federal government to step in. On Friday, after the states had reported still no break-through, I asked Lochhead by e-mail if his remarks from January were still appropriate. They were, he said.
“It seems as I write this, that — as for the last two years — the states remain stuck in political talking points and the federal government is not applying necessary pressure. And, in the meantime, Lake Powell is headed toward run-of-the-river operations, which precipitates crises on all kinds of different levels,” he replied. “This will lead to the federal government having to make decisions that will severely impact both upper and lower basin economies and the environment, not to mention endless, expensive and risky litigation. This all could have been avoided but here we are.”
“Wow!” said Eric Kuhn, a former general manager of the Colorado River District in Glenwood Springs, in a LinkedIn post over the weekend. “The secretary (of Interior) needs to step up and make some hard decisions!”
Sparking Kuhn’s remarks was a new Bureau of Reclamation report on Friday of probable flows in the next two years. The best of them leaves Powell in bad shape. In fact, the bureau’s “probable” flows have frequently been too optimistic. The dimmer view, called “probable minimum,” sees Powell levels dropping below the elevation needed to produce hydropower as early as August. Minimum power pool is above deadpool.
Note the dotted red line. If says that it’s possible that power production at Glen Canyon Dam could end by August.
From a Colorado perspective, lower-basin states have a sense of entitlement that defies common sense. Whether it defies the law is another matter. Kuhn told me years ago that the key provision in the 1922 compact that can be interpreted in two very different ways.
It says: “The States of the Upper Division will note cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre feet for any period of ten consecutive years…”
But as to that disagreement: Upper-basin states see this meaning that they have no control over the weather. They did not cause the reduced flows. Hang the weather, says the lower-basin state. The “do not cause” clause means that if only 7.5 million acre-feet is all that is in the river, it all has to flow downstream.
Typo or not, the lower-basin perspective sees this as a cut-and-dried issue. If Denver must go without transmountain diversions or taps in Winter Park or Vail must go dry, so be it. Not their problem.
JB Hamby, California’s representative on Colorado River affairs, articulated exactly that sentiment on Friday. “The 1922 Colorado River Compact requires the Upper Basin to deliver an average of 8.25 million acre-feet annually to the Lower Basin and Mexico,” he said in a statement. “That delivery obligation is fixed in law, even when the river produces less water.”
At the January forum, Amy Ostdiek, who heads the legal team for the Colorado Water Conservation Board in interstate and federal matters, laid out the basic numbers Colorado puts front and center: The 1922 compact laid out a split of roughly 7.5 million acre-feet for each, the lower and upper basins, with the upper basin required to allow another one million acre-feet to flow down river to account for evaporation and losses.
“We have to be honest about what has caused the threat that Lake Powell might not be able to make the releases that the lower-basin states believe they are entitled to. It was directly caused by their overuse of Lake Mead, which drew down Lake Powell to the point it is today,” said Ostdiek.
Again, the upper-basin states insist upon lower-basin states sharing the uncertainty of snow and rain. To rebuild the storages will mean they take less water.
“This is going to be hard for those who are not accustomed to taking less in dry years, but the benefit of reaching a state-state deal is that if we’re able to do that, it provides an opportunity or a gradual and softer landing — and more likely federal dollars for those who need that support as they adapt to this reality.”
The upper basin, though, refuses to budge on the idea that it can develop all 7.5 million acre-feet of water apportioned it by the compact — if the water is there, of course.
In their January remarks, neither Lochhead nor Ostdiek offered thoughts about on-the-ground solutions. Ostdiek pointed to programs in both the upper and lower basin with varying success. In their defense, they only had an hour.
Can the lower-basin negotiators truly misunderstand Colorado’s position? Ken Neubecker, of Glenwood Springs, formerly of environmental groups, thinks so.
“They have been accustomed, some would say addicted, to the reliable delivery of stored water for all their needs since Hoover Dam was built and began releasing stored water some 90 years ago,” he wrote in a post on Substack. “Only until very recently, even in the face of an unrelenting drought, have they had to deal with shortages. For the Upper Basin, shortage is an annual reality.”
Arizona Navy photo via California State University
Rod Proffitt, from Pagosa Springs, (and a board member for Big Pivots) points to Arizona’s history of going to courts to resolve river issues. “They even sent out the National Guard one time” (in a dispute with California),” he observed. And now Arizona, more than any other state, has its back to the wall.
Phoenix had native water, but expansive growth, among the fastest in the nation, has been enabled by imported Colorado River water since the 1990s. Photo/Allen Best
Most instructive, at least as understanding Arizona, may be George Packer’s 25,000-word piece, “What Will Become of American Civilization,” in the July/August 2024 issue of The Atlantic. During the prior year, Packer had spent several weeks or more, winter and summer, primarily in the Phoenix metropolitan region, to analyze its politics and people.
Most perplexing, he found, was the perfervid belief in population and commercial expansion that defies limitations of a climate where a simple fall onto concrete during summer can produce second-degree burns.
Colorado, of course, has its own love of economic expansion. It is dwarfed by Arizona. The latter grew 824% in population from 1950 to 2016 while Colorado grew 318%.
Water is crucial to these expansions, and Arizona has tried to disregard limits. Packer explicitly uses “water” 158 times in his report and implicitly so elsewhere. He started out with a description of the Hohokam Indians and their water infrastructure that can still be seen in Phoenix. He barely mentioned climate change but did use “heat” 32 times. He talks about water for data centers and the suburban sprawl.
“Phoenix makes you keenly aware of human artifice—its ingenuity and its fragility,” he says.
We’ve seen the ingenuity of water delivery systems in the broader Colorado River Basin, a region that extends from Colorado’s borders with Nebraska and Kansas to the Pacific Ocean. We now understand the fragility, and it makes us very, very uncomfortable.
Anything that forces change can bring out our worst, but then sometimes it can bring out our best. Can it get any worse on the Colorado River?
And also:
The five alternatives
The Bureau of Reclamation issued five alternatives in its draft environmental impact statement for how it will operate Glen Canyon Dam. The federal government, said Lochhead, can only implement two of them.
The first two, said Lochhead, are deeply flawed: No action and the second would impose shortages on Arizona and Nevada approaching 7 million acre-feet. Both alternatives would almost certainly be challenged in court. Both would quickly result in Powell reaching deadpool with compact litigation and unspecified federal actions in the upper basin to protect Powell.
The three other alternatives contain the essential elements of an agreement among the states, he said, including up to four million acre-feet of shortages in the lower base, but not by priority, and leaving pools in the two big reservoirs for conserved water by both upper and lower basins.
“Not surprising, the alternatives with the highest shortages in the two basins and the greatest flexibility perform the best again potential hydrology that illustrates the magnitude of the problem we’re in, and the actions required by both upper and lower basins to address it,” he said. For any of this to work, he added, “we need long-term funding to mitigate the impacts and build resilience in both basins.
A brief recent history:
Lochhead also sketched a brief history of agreements during recent decades on the Colorado River. His excerpted comments follow:
This slide shows the combined contents of lakes Powell and Mead for the last 25 years juxtaposed against some of the key events and agreements that have occurred during that 25-year period.
Despite the best efforts of the states, reservoir levels have continued to decline over time. The states, though, have made important agreements and have significantly reduced uses in response to changing conditions on the river. But clearly, much more needs to be done.
Starting in the early 1990s we had 10 years of negotiations that led to Federal Surplus Guidelines in 2001. You can see, at the beginning of this century, the reservoirs were virtually full, and we were arguing about surpluses.
Those guidelines also contained a deadline for California to finalize and implement the Quantification Settlement Agreement among California agencies to define priorities and implement ag-urban transfers necessary to get California’s water use from 5.3 million acre-feet a year down to 4.4 million acre-feet a year. The negotiations were driven by the direct involvement and pressure from Secretary (Bruce) Babbitt and his team at the Department Interior. That’s a theme — federal pressure being necessary to agreements of the Basin States over the last 25 years.
The California agencies had to come together and agree on how they were going to reduce their use by 800,000 acre-feet. They couldn’t reach agreement, and so Interior imposed limitations on water use in the Imperial Valley, prompting litigation that was eventually settled in 2003.
Lochhead credited Interior Secretary Gayle Norton and Bennet Raley, the assistant secretary for water, for pushing California to this agreement. Both, incidentally, were Colorado natives, Norton from Denver’s northern suburbs and Raley from southwest Colorado. Upon Raleys’ departure from the Interior in 2004, the Los Angeles Times had this to say:
“Raley may be remembered best as the folksy but firm bureaucrat who finally made good on the federal government’s long-standing threat to put California on a water diet. He did it by forcing the state to agree to stop using more than its share of the Colorado River, freeing up water for other Western states.”
Despite the arguments about surplus waters in the 1990s, some observers could see troubles ahead of a river overcommitted. Troubles arrived in a big way with the water-poor year of 2002 — a runoff that may turn out better than this year’s.
Lochhead recalled that the upper-basin states, wanting to maintain storage in Lake Powell, asked the Interior Department — the operator of the dam — to release less than 8.23 million acre-feet from the reservoir. Lower-basin states, primarily Arizona, resisted. Difficult meetings ensued, litigation was threatened, legal war chests were readied — then Norton interceded, issuing a deadline by the end of 2007 for an agreement about lower basin shortage guidelines and operational guidelines for releases of water from Powell and Mead.
The states met that deadline — unlike those of the last year — and the guidelines helped. But, said Lochhead, they have proven, over time, to be inadequate. It seemed like every year we were one foot over or under, those triggers that caused distrust and accusations between the upper and lower basins of gaming the system.
Meanwhile, the river produced less than anybody had expected. The states agreed to additional interim measures, and they, too, proved inadequate.
In 2019, the states agreed to a drought contingency plan and drought response agreement, more interim measures designed to protect the system’s major reservoirs from falling to critically low levels. The lower-basin states agreed to plan that added an extra layer of protection. The goal was to maintain a half million acre-feet of water in Lake Mead.
Declines in lower basin
Lochhead showed a chart of water use in the lower basin but with caveats. It did not include the tributaries, including the Gila River —- a conversation unto itself. Nor does it show reservoir evaporations and losses, which add up to about 1.5 million acre-feet annually, what is often called the structural deficit.
The blue line at the top showed a significant reduction in use starting in 2001, then a fairly steady use of about 7.5 million acre-feet until about 2017, when withdrawals begin to drop due to shortages.
Uneven use in upper basin
The next slide showed the variations of use by the upper-basin states. The chart shows ups and downs, which can be attributed to wetter and dryer cycles. Overall, though, water use in the upper-basin states has remained fairly constant. Those uses, he added, do not include reservoir evaporation — because those losses are explicitly included in upper-basin consumptive use.
“Part of the argument, part of the confusion, comes from these different accounting methodologies in the upper and lower basins,” he said.
The upper basin has made a couple of arguments. One is that the upper basin has the right to develop more water, up to 7.5 million acre-feet, but also that hydrology is the limiting factor. Users suffer shortages every year. I’m not sure you can have both.”
Again, hydrology is the limiting factor.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
The rules that control releases from Lake Powell and Lake Mead are very different. Lake Powell’s releases are determined by an Annual Operating Plan that has little flexibility during the year. Lake Mead’s releases change each month in response to changing delivery requirements to Lower Basin users. The impact of these different release rules on each reservoir’s storage was illustrated this autumn and early winter when Lake Powell steadily declined and Lake Mead steadily increased. The magnitude of Powell’s decline and Mead’s increase compensated for one another, and the total combined storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead did not change.
During the four months between October 1 and February 1, Lake Mead’s releases were reduced in response to decreasing Lower Basin demands, but Lake Powell’s releases were not similarly reduced. Lake Powell lost 615,000 af during the four-month study period, and Lake Mead gained the same amount.
On February 1, Lake Mead had 2,714,000 af more water than Lake Powell, the largest difference between the two reservoirs since April 2022.
Modest flood inflows in early October delayed drawdown of Lake Powell by six weeks. Releases during the four-month study period were the second smallest since at least 2010[1]. Releases from Lake Mead were the smallest since at least 2010. Despite the small inflows to Lake Mead, the increase in storage in Lake Mead during the study period was the largest since 2019.
The four-month delay in depletion of the combined storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead saved between 400,000 to 900,000 af.
Forecasts for spring snowmelt inflow to Lake Powell are not encouraging and have been declining all winter, because Rocky Mountain snowpack remains meager.
[1]We compared the inflows, outflows, changes in storage, and Lower Basin consumptive uses between 2010 and 2026.
Briefly
In mid-September 2025, we noted that if the 2026 snowmelt was as little as in 2025, the total realistically accessible combined storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell reservoirs (hereafter referred to as Powell+Mead) would likely fall to less than 4 million acre-feet (af) by early autumn 2026, less than the 21st century minimum of March 2023. At the mid-point of winter 2025-2026, where do we stand?
Despite the bad news associated with this winter’s meager Rocky Mountain snowpack and the prospect of insignificant spring inflow to Lake Powell, unusually large autumn rainfall, alongside involuntary shortages and compensated system conservation efforts, reduced the need for deliveries to Lower Basin users, resulting in a significant increase in storage in Lake Mead that matched the drawdown of Lake Powell. As a result, total combined storage In Powell+Mead did not change in October, November, December, and January[1]. This is a helpful and important outcome.
Total inflow to Lake Powell and from sources between Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Mead totaled 1.72 million af during the four-month study period (Table 1). Outflows from Lake Mead, including consumptive use by Nevada and estimated evaporation losses from Lake Powell and Lake Mead, were 1.75 million af. Because the combined storage of Powell+Mead did not change, the Inflows and the outflows, including losses must have been equal. The small discrepancy between inflows and outflows from this two-reservoir system (last two rows of Table 1) remind us of the inherent uncertainty and imprecision of some measurements. In this case, the sources of uncertainty include unmeasured inflows, unmeasured gains and losses of bank storage, and uncertainty in measurements, especially of evaporation.
Table 1. Inflows, outflows, and evaporation losses in Powell+ Mead between October 1, 2025, and February 1, 2026. Blue colors highlight terms used to calculate inflows to the Powell+Mead system. Red colors highlight terms used to calculate outflows and losses from Powell+Mead.
Even though the total amount of water in Powel+Mead did not change, Lake Powell dropped and Lake Mead rose during the study period resulting in transfer of water from Lake Powell to Lake Mead. Lake Powell lost 615,000 af during the four-month study period, and Lake Mead gained the same amount. Autumn rains modestly augmented inflows to Lake Powell, and Reclamation significantly reduced releases at Hoover Dam, such that inflows and outflows to Powell+Mead approximately balanced each other.
On February 1, Lake Mead had 2,714,000 af more water than Lake Powell, the largest difference between the two reservoirs since April 2022[2] (Fig. 1). Divergence in the amount stored in each reservoir resulted from different operating rules. Releases from Lake Powell in the Upper Basin are established in an Annual Operating Plan intended to meet the Upper Basin’s delivery obligation to the Lower Basin. This plan has little flexibility to adjust releases in response to unexpected changes in inflow. In contrast, releases from Lake Mead are adjusted to the changing delivery requirements to Lower Basin users. As demand in the Lower Basin decreased in autumn and early winter, releases from Lake Mead were significantly reduced.
Figure 1. Graph showing active storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell since January 1, 2022.
Details
Although October flood inflows to Lake Powell were modest, this short period of augmented inflow delayed the long-term decline in storage by six weeks, an important respite for the reservoir. Inflow to Lake Powell from the Colorado River, the largest source of inflow, was only 75% of average in November, December, and January but exceeded the three-year average between October 12 and 19[3]. Inflow from the San Juan River, the second largest inflow source, exceeded the long-term daily average between October 11 and 22 and between November 15 and 24[4]. As a result, storage in Lake Powell increased by 105,000 af between October 9 and 20, the period when inflow exceeded reservoir release (Fig. 2). The rate of subsequent reservoir decline was much slower than the initial rise, and it was not until late November that Lake Powell returned to the elevation it had been just before the onset of the October floods.
Figure 2. Graph showing Lake Powell inflows and releases. Inflows were calculated as the sum of stream flow measured at USGS gages on the Colorado River above Gypsum Canyon, the Dirty Devil River above Poison Springs Wash, the Escalante River near Escalante, and the San Juan River near Bluff. Releases measured at Lees Ferry represent the sum of actual releases and ground-water seepage from Lake Powell.
The drop in Lake Powell that began in late October occurred despite Reclamation’s decision to delay release of approximately 600,000 af until summer 2026.[5] Total release from Lake Powell during the study period was 2.106 million af, the second smallest fall and early winter release since 2010 (Table 2).
Table 2. Releases from Lake Powell and inflow, change in storage, and releases from Lake Mead in October, November, December, and January.
1Colorado River at Lees Ferry 2Colorado River above Diamond Creek near Peach Springs 3Reclamation, Lower Basin Accounting Reports. Hydrodata for 2025-26.
Reclamation reduced releases from Lake Mead beginning in mid-November. In response, storage increased, because inflows exceeded releases (Fig. 3). Recovery of Lake Mead during these months was the largest since 2019 and was 5% greater than the median autumn and early winter recovery since 2010 (Table 2). Releases from Lake Mead were the smallest since at least 2010 and were 30% less than the median total release for those years. The increase in Lake Mead occurred despite the small releases from Lake Powell.
Figure 3. Graph showing Lake Mead inflows and releases since October 1, 2025. Inflows were calculated as the sum of stream flow measured at USGS gages of the Colorado River upstream from Diamond Creek, Diamond Creek, and the Virgin River downstream from Muddy Creek.
The small demand for water from Lake Mead was due to a combination of significantly reduced agricultural demand caused by abundant autumn precipitation in California’s Imperial and Coachella Valleys, the Yuma area, and elsewhere in Arizona and southeastern California as well as ongoing Lower Basin programs including involuntary shortage cuts (mostly) to Arizona, Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) contributions, and reductions in water use from compensated system conservation. Although agricultural consumptive use in Arizona and the Imperial Valley is always smallest between November and February, demand in fall 2025, especially in November, was unusually small (Table 3). Withdrawal of water by the Central Arizona Water Conservation District (CAWCD) into the Central Arizona Project (CAP) canal and consumptive use by the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) in November 2025 was less than in any previous November since at least 2010 and was 26% and 54% of the median November use[6], respectively, by those districts. Consumption in October and November by other Arizona users of mainstem Colorado River water was the second smallest since at least 1979 and CAWCD use in October was the second smallest since 1995. Only in 2024 was use less. Use by the Metropolitan Water District in January was the second smallest of the study period.
Table 3. Monthly consumptive use in parts of the Lower Basin in October, November, December, and January.
1Lowest monthly use since at least 2010 2 Second lowest monthly use since at least 2010 3Median monthly use computed for 2010-2026
A Bit of a Silver Lining
What was the significance of the four-month delay in depletion of Powell+Mead? Combined Powell+Mead storage increased between October 1 and February 1 twice since 2010, in the large runoff years of 2011 and 2019 (Table 4). In all other years, storage declined during these four months, and this year’s decrease of 200 af was the smallest decline among those 12 recent years of decline. The median drawdown of the 12 years of decline was 660,000 af and ranged between this year’s tiny drawdown and drawdown of more than 1 million af in 2012 and 2020. It is beyond the scope of this paper to estimate what the drawdown of Powell+Mead would have otherwise been, but a reasonable estimate of the water savings caused by the delayed drawdown of Powell+Mead this year is between 400,000 to 900,000 af[7]. To this small degree, the autumn rains and programs and policies to reduce Lower Basin demand allowed the Basin’s water managers to take one small step back from the edge of the cliff.
Table 4. Change in the combined storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead between October 1 and February 1 in indicated years.
1The combined contents of Lake Powell and Lake Mead began to increase on January 13, 2016. Between October 1 and January 13, the two reservoirs lost 655,000 af.
But, the Bad News
Bad news looms in the future, especially for Lake Powell. The January 2026 24-Month Study’s most probable forecast predicts that in March 2027, storage in Lake Powell will drop to 4,382,000 af of active storage, of which only 150,000 af is realistically accessible (3 ft above reservoir elevation 3500 ft).[8] When Lake Powell is at or below elevation 3500 ft, reservoir releases are complicated by the risk of cavitation in the Glen Canyon Dam turbines and the inability to constantly use the river outlet works. Under the minimum probable inflow forecast, the predicted elevation of Lake Powell is 3476 ft in March 2027, an elevation in which no water could be released through the penstocks and no hydropower would be produced.
Even the minimum probable forecast may be overly optimistic, because the forecast for April – July unregulated inflow to Lake Powell has been progressively decreasing, because the winter’s snowpack remains meager. The Colorado River Basin Forecast Center’s official February 1 forecast is that the 50th percentile prediction (considered the most probable forecast) is 2.4 million af, significantly less than the January forecast of 3.65 million af (Fig. 4). The 90th percentile prediction (considered the minimum probable forecast) has dropped from 2.1 million af to 950,000 af. If the actual unregulated inflow were to be that of the minimum probable forecast, 2026 would replace 2002 as the lowest April to July inflow on record. Reclamation’s February 24-Month Study will be released in mid-February, and those results will certainly draw considerable attention.
Figure 4. Graph showing forecast of unregulated inflow to Lake Powell made by NOAA’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. The dark blue line is the median forecast. The downward trend of the forecast means that more recent forecasts are predicting smaller inflows to Lake Powell. The redlines are the official CBRFC forecasts that the USBR uses as input for the 24- Month Studies.
Unless the snowpack significantly improves between now and early April, Reclamation will have difficult choices to make. Ideally, the agency could use a combination of a large release from Flaming Gorge Reservoir coupled with an additional reduction in releases from Lake Powell to keep the elevation of Lake Powell above 3500 ft. Unless Flaming Gorge Reservoir releases are implemented using the Secretary of the Interior’s emergency authority, however, consultation and agreement with the Upper Basin states will be required. This was the strategy used in 2022, and Reclamation has indicated that even with a release of water from upstream reservoirs, there may still be a need for reductions in Lake Powell releases.[9] However, if the annual release from Lake Powell is reduced to 7 million af or less, the 10-year delivery of water from the Upper Basin to the Lower Basin will be less than what some states consider the delivery obligation of the Upper Basin (i.e., the Compact tripwire). In such a circumstance, interstate litigation might ensue.
Until basin-wide uses are reduced to meet the available supply, there are no good choices!
[1] Combined active storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell was 14,974,197 on October 1, 2025. Combined storage on February 1, 2026, was 14,973,991af. [2] The disparity between storage in the two reservoirs has continued to increase. On February 8, Lake Mead had 2,810,000 af more water in storage than Lake Powell. [3] Average flow of the Colorado River at Gypsum Canyon near Hite was calculated between June 30, 2023, and January 31, 2026. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/USGS-09328960/statistics/. [4] Average flow of the San Juan River near Bluff was calculated between October 30, 1914, and January 31, 2026. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/USGS-09379500/statistics/. [5] The goal of delayed release was to protect a target elevation at Lake Powell of 3525 feet. Adjustments to Glen Canyon Dam monthly releases were adjusted to hold back 598,000 af in Lake Powell between December 2025 and April 2026 (Reclamation, January 2026 24-Month Study). https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/g4000/24mo.pdf. [6] 2010-2025 [7] This is the interquartile range of the 12 years when Powell+Mead declined in storage. [8] For an explanation of “realistically accessible storage” see Schmidt et al., Analysis of Colorado River Basin Storage Suggests Need For Immediate Action, Sep. 11, 2025, https://www.inkstain.net/2025/09/analysis-of-colorado-river-basin-storage-suggests-need-for-immediate-action/. [9] Reclamation, 2024 SEIS ROD: Section 6(E) Monthly Meeting, Jan. 22, 2026.
Authors:
[1] Director, Center for Colorado River Studies, Utah State University, former Chief, Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center. [2] Retired General Manager, Colorado River Water Conservation District. [3] Getches-Wilkinson Center, University of Colorado Law School, former US Commissioner, Upper Colorado River Commission, former Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, US Dept. of the Interior. [4] Kyl Center for Water Policy, Arizona State University, former Director, Phoenix Water Services. [5] Staff Attorney, Utton Transboundary Resources Center, University of New Mexico.
When you look out across a snowy winter landscape, it might seem like nature is fast asleep. Yet, under the surface, tiny organisms are hard at work, consuming the previous year’s dead plant material and other organic matter.
These soil microorganisms – Earth’s recyclers – liberate nutrients that will act as fertilizer once grasses and other plants wake up with the spring snowmelt.
Key among them are arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, found in over 75% of plant species around the planet. These threadlike fungi grow like webs inside plant roots, where they provide up to 50% of the plant’s nutrient and water supply in exchange for plant carbon, which the fungi use to grow and reproduce.
A magnified view shows filaments and vesicles of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi weaving through the outer cells of a plant root. Outside the root, the filaments of hyphae gather nutrients from the soil. Edouard Evangelisti, et al., New Phytologist, 2021, CC BY
In winter, the snowpack insulates mycorrhizal fungi and other microorganisms like a blanket, allowing them to continue to decompose soil organic matter, even when air temperatures above the snow are well below freezing. However, when rain washes out the snowpack or a healthy snowpack doesn’t form, water in the soil can later freeze – as can mycorrhizal fungi.
In a new study in the Rocky Mountain grasslands, we dug into plots of land that for three decades scientists led by ecologist John Harte had warmed by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) using suspended heaters that mimicked the air temperature the area is likely to see by the end of this century.
Above ground, the plots shifted over that time from predominantly grassland to more desertlike shrublands. Under the surface, we found something else: There were noticeably fewer beneficial mycorrhizal fungi, which left plants less able to acquire nutrients or buffer themselves from environmental stressors like freezing temperatures and drought.
These changes represent a major shift in the ecosystem, one that, on a wide scale, could reverberate through the food web as the grasses and forbs, such as wildflowers, that cattle and wildlife rely on decline and are replaced by a more desertlike environment.
When plants and fungi get out of sync
Warmer winters and a changing snowpack can affect the growth of plants and fungi in a few important ways.
One of the first signs of changing winters is when the timing of plant, fungal and animal activities that rely on one another get out of sync. For example, a mountain of evidence from around the world has documented how early snowmelt can lead to flowers blooming before pollinators arrive.
Timing also matters for plants that rely on mycorrhizal fungi – their growth must overlap.
Since plants are cued to light in addition to temperature, whereas underground microorganisms are cued to temperature and nutrient availability, warmer winters may cause microorganisms to be active well before their plant counterparts.
A view across the subalpine grasslands outside the experimental plots. Stephanie Kivlin
At our research site, in a subalpine meadow in Colorado, we also initiated an early snowmelt experiment in April 2023 that advanced snowmelt in five large plots by about two weeks.
We found that the early snowmelt advanced mycorrhizal fungal growth by one week, but we didn’t find a corresponding change in the growth of plant roots. When mycorrhizal fungi are active before plants, the plants don’t benefit from the nutrients that mycorrhizal fungi are taking up from the soil.
Disappearing nutrients
Early snowmelt can also lead to a loss of nutrients from the soil.
When microorganisms decompose organic matter in warmer soils, nutrients accumulate in the air and water pockets between soil particles. These nutrients are then available for mycorrhizal fungi to transfer to plants. While mycorrhizal fungi transfer nutrients to the plant, other fungi are primarily decomposers that keep the nutrients for themselves.
However, if rain falls on the snow or the snow melts early, before plants are active, the nutrients can leach from the soil into lakes and streams. The effect is similar to fertilizer runoff from farm fields – the nutrients fuel algae growth, which can create low-oxygen dead zones. At the same time, plants in the field have fewer nutrients available.
Without a thick snowpack, soils can also freeze for longer periods in the winter, leading to lower microbial activity and scarce resources at the onset of spring.
The future of changing winters
Under all of these scenarios – a timing mismatch, more rain causing nutrients to leach out or frozen soil – warmer winters are leading to less spring growth.
Ecosystems are often resilient, however. Organisms could acclimate to lower nutrient concentrations or shift their ranges to more favorable conditions. How plants and mycorrhizal fungi both adapt will determine how this hidden world adjusts to changing winters.
So, the next time rain on snow or a snow drought delays your outdoor winter plans, remember that it’s more than a hassle for humans – it’s affecting that hidden world below, with potentially long-term effects.
Between 2025 and 2050, our analysis finds that climate change could impose roughly $33 billion to $37 billion in additional costs and resilience needs across Colorado’s health, infrastructure, wildfire, flooding, and winter recreation impacts. The largest quantified drivers are extreme heat, which could lead to about 1,800 to 1,900 additional heat-related deaths, or about $24 billion to $25 billion in losses, and infrastructure pressures totaling about $8.3 billion to $8.7 billion in added costs and upgrades as roads, bridges, stormwater systems, and building cooling demand are pushed beyond historical design conditions. Wildfire smoke and property impacts add another $1.3 billion, with additional resilience needs on the order of $2.3 billion. These figures do not capture every hazard or indirect loss, but they make one point clear: Planning and investment now can save lives and avoid much larger costs later.
Executive Summary (2025 TO 2050)
Colorado is already experiencing the effects of a warming climate: hotter summers, longer wildfire seasons, more smoke exposure, and mounting pressure on critical infrastructure and water-dependent industries. These changes are not abstract. They influence public health, household costs, and the reliability of roads, bridges, and stormwater systems, while increasing the risk of disruptive, high-loss events.
Across the impacts we quantify, total projected costs from 2025 to 2050 are on the order of $50 billion to $54 billion, of which $36 billion to $37 billion represents additional costs directly attributable to climate change, plus defined resilience investments.
This executive summary highlights projected climate-related damages and resilience needs from 2025 to 2050. It is intended for policymakers, community leaders, and reporters who need a clear, comparable set of numbers to understand the scale of the challenge. Results are shown under two global emissions pathways that bracket plausible futures: a medium-high pathway (SSP3-7.0) and a high-end emissions pathway (SSP5-8.5).
Among Colorado’s health, infrastructure, wildfire, flooding, and winter recreation impacts, the largest quantified drivers are extreme heat, which could lead to about 1,800 to 1,900 additional heat-related deaths, or about $24 billion to $25 billion in losses, and infrastructure pressures totaling about $8.3 billion to $8.7 billion in added costs and upgrades as roads, bridges, stormwater systems, and building cooling demand are pushed beyond historical design conditions. Wildfire smoke and property impacts add another $1.3 billion, with additional resilience needs on the order of $2.3 billion. These figures do not capture every hazard or indirect loss, but they make one point clear: Planning and investment now can save lives and avoid much larger costs later.
How we estimated impacts: For each sector, we combine Colorado-specific historical records with downscaled climate projections to quantify how key hazards change over time. We then estimate climate-attributable impacts by comparing projected outcomes to a counterfactual that holds climate hazards at 1995 to 2014 baseline levels while allowing underlying trends to continue. Where relevant, we also estimate defined resilience investments, such as bridge upgrades, stormwater improvements, wildfire mitigation, and snowmaking, that can reduce future losses. All monetary values are reported in 2024 dollars.
Because not every climate impact can be modeled with available data, these estimates should be viewed as conservative. They cover major, quantifiable pathways but do not include every hazard, indirect economic spillover, or nonfatal health effect.
Plans for the Wild Horse Reservoir have recently updated the location of the proposed water reserve in Hartsel based on Aurora Water’s evaluation of several alternative locations in preparation for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM)’s National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process. Located southwest of Spinney Mountain Reservoir, the site will be shifting to the Wild Horse South Reservoir, a move that representatives of Aurora Water describe as having significant advantages for construction. Aurora Water Assistant General Manager Sarah Young stated in a media briefing on the recent planning change that the NEPA process Aurora Water has been working through with the BLM, in collaboration with Park County government, aims to both clarify the need for the project and understand all available alternatives for meeting that need.
“We evaluated twenty different options,” Young said. “As we were evaluating these alternatives, what we found out is that the Wild Horse South Reservoir has a number of significant advantages.”
In addition to the initially proposed Wild Horse Reservoir Project, some of the alternatives included the Small Wild Horse Reservoir and Denver Basin Aquifer Storage and Recovery (ASR) Alternative, expanding existing capacities in Spinney Mountain Reservoir, a no-action alternative and the Wild Horse South Reservoir Alternative. Regarding the project’s need, the proposed reservoir undertaking aims to enhance the City of Aurora’s water management of supplies from the Arkansas and Colorado River basins. As the third-largest city in Colorado, Aurora serves over 400,000 residents, yet lacks access to an immediate water source. Projections in the statewide Colorado Water Plan indicate that a significant statewide water supply gap is anticipated by 2050 and the Wild Horse Reservoir was identified in Aurora’s 2017 Integrated Water Master Plan as a crucial step in meeting the growing need. The shift in plans comes during a record low snow pack year for Colorado, the lowest since 1987, which is projected to affect state water resources down the line.
“When we’re having a year like we’re having right now, [Wild Horse] will help us bridge these types of droughts by storing water that comes from times when the snowpack is much better,” Young said.
You’ve seen that quote here before – and you’ll probably see it again; if this were a Wagnerian opera, that line would be a lietmotif, a recurring musical thread associated with a particular character or place or idea in the story being told musically. And who’s to say, ‘The Romance of the Colorado River,’ Frederick Dellenbaugh’s title, might make a grand opera.
But before launching into the next chapter in the ‘Romance of the Colorado River,’ there are some items of news to note. The no-news item of course continues to be the ongoing stalemate in the ongoing negotiations between the Upper and Lower Colorado River Basins. On the eve of their Valentine’s Day deadline, there is talk of new ‘interim interim guidelines,’ two to five years, for at least a nominal state presence as the Bureau of Reclamation tries to keep the lights on and some water flowing.
The bigger news is the extent to which the Colorado River Basin continues this winter to experience the reality we have created: an ongoing anthropogenic ‘heat drought’ (February temperatures in the 50s to 8,000 feet elevation this past week), coupled with a ‘dry drought’ – probably also caused by anthropogenic warming-induced changes over the Pacific Ocean. Snowpacks in the mountains from whence the river’s waters flow range from 35 to 85 percent of normal in mid-February; we may be heading for new records in low runoff.
The biggest news, but probably less noted, is a new take on the larger reality we have created globally. Late in January, the United Nations headquarters came out with a fairly astounding announcement:
“Amid chronic groundwater depletion, water overallocation, land and soil degradation, deforestation, and pollution, all compounded by global heating, a UN report today declared the dawn of an era of global water bankruptcy, inviting world leaders to facilitate honest, science-based adaptation to a new reality.” (Emphasis added)
This announcement was generally ignored, in the world’s morbid fascination over ‘what the Trumpsters are breaking today.’ But the scientists who generated this report claim that phrases like ‘water stress’ and ‘water crisis’ are too hopeful, suggesting deviations from a normalcy that we might somehow be able to get back to. Today, they say, ‘many rivers, lakes, aquifers, wetlands, and glaciers have been pushed beyond tipping points and cannot bounce back to past baselines.’ Bankruptcy.
A short list of global ‘hotspots’ included the American Southwest, where ‘the Colorado River and its reservoirs have become symbols of over-promised water,’ with no reasonable hope of ever fulfilling those promises. Nothing new there – but calling it a state of bankruptcy bumps the desperation level up a little.
Now, back to the ‘Romance of the Colorado River.’ Do remember that when we talk about ‘romancing’ here, we are not talking about a sappy love story; we are talking about people muscling up to take on a challenge that is beyond or below the mundanity of life. In the last post on this site, we looked at ‘the Colorado River and the Romance of Exploration.’ Dellenbaugh’s Romance of the Colorado River was published in 1903, and covered the adventures of everyone from the early Spanish conquistadores trying to sail up the river from its delta, to the trappers strip-mining the beavers from its upper tributaries, with a final focus on the explorations of John Wesley Powell who first sketch-mapped the unknown area between the upper river and the lower.
Dellenbaugh pulled no punches in describing his sense of the river and the challenge it represented. After noting in his introduction that ‘in every country, the great rivers have presented attractive pathways for interior exploration—gateways for settlement,’ serving as ‘friends and allies’ – he launches into his initial impressions of the Colorado River:
“By contrast, it is all the more remarkable to meet with one great river which is none of these helpful things, but which, on the contrary, is a veritable dragon, loud in its dangerous lair, defiant, fierce, opposing utility everywhere, refusing absolutely to be bridled by Commerce, perpetuating a wilderness, prohibiting mankind’s encroachments, and in its immediate tide presenting a formidable host of snarling waters whose angry roar, reverberating wildly league after league between giant rock-walls carved through the bowels of the earth, heralds the impossibility of human conquest and smothers hope.“
Opposing utility everywhere? Refusing absolutely to be bridled by Commerce? Heralding the impossibility of human conquest, smothering hope? Could he have said anything more stirring in throwing down the gauntlet to an adolescent civilization?
Dellenbaugh’s Romance does sort of follow the formula of today’s sappy romance novel, but on the grand scale of the romantic adventure: first you establish the object of the protagonist’s ‘dangerous’ love as arrogant or disturbed or otherwise undesirable or unattainable – but therefore… irresistibly attractive. Why are we drawn to such hard cases? Why wouldn’t we leave such an angry and extreme river alone, like countless generations of First Peoples had done, settling riparian along its tributaries and even the mainstream, but just living with the ‘veritable dragon’ as it was, and doing nothing to confront or challenge it? Or to bend it to their perceived needs? But we Euro-Americans are a civilization in which ‘love conquers all’ – or else. Love or its simulacra – lust for wealth, for power, for knowledge, whatever. Come not between a woman and her lust for impossible men – or a civilization and its lust for everything it doesn’t already control.
So it almost seems more destiny than coincidence that when Dellenbaugh wrapped up the ‘Romance of Exploration’ in 1903, that was also the year the U.S. Reclamation Service went to work, following the Reclamation Act of 1902, to reclaim and conserve the river.
Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir at Glacier Point. By Underwood & Underwood – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3g04698. See Commons:Licensing for more information., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3517191
We call Theodore Roosevelt ‘the father of American conservation,’ but he did not have the commonly accepted sense of conservation that we have today. Conservation to Roosevelt and his sidekick Gifford Pinchot was the full and efficient development of resources otherwise wasted. Freshwater running off to the ocean in an unmanageable spring flood was a prime example of profligate ‘waste’; they took it on through a Reclamation Service charged with working with farm communities, to develop irrigation systems to get water out of the rampant river and on to the dry land, thus conserving for human use both the land and water, each ‘useless’ until combined with the other.
The Reclamation Service was created as a division of the U.S. Geological Survey, which was still a bulwark of John Wesley Powell’s disciplined science in the otherwise freewheeling Interior Department, aka General Land Office, charged primarily with privatizing the public lands through the Homestead Act and other laws. From the start, the Reclamation Service was filled with idealistic young engineers infused with the spirit of Rooseveltian conservation – the kind of idealism that could gradually transmogrify into the unconscious arrogance of those who Know They Are Doing Good and are therefore Always Right.
Their idealism is reflected in an article written in 1918 by C.J. Blanchard of the U.S. Reclamation Service, for The Mentor, an educational publication:
“A vein of romance runs through every form of human endeavor…. In the desert romance finds its chief essentials in adventure, courage, daring and self-sacrifice. For more than half a century man has been writing a romance of compelling interest upon the face of the dusty earth. Irrigation, with Midas’ touch, has changed the desert’s frown to smiling vistas of verdure.“
In a section titled ‘The Romance of Reclamation,’ Blanchard described the reclamation engineers as men not concerned about ‘large emoluments, for government salaries are notoriuously meager’; instead, ‘as they toiled in the fastness of mountains, an abysmal canyons or far out in the voiceless desert, through the blazing heat of the Southwest or the fierce blizzards of the northern plains, this thought was uppermost, “By this work we shall make the desert bloom.”’
But the reclamation engineers quickly found working at the farm end of irrigation systems drawing water from the wildly varying flows of the Colorado River frustrating at best, impossible at worst. And they were engineers, not scientists – engineers with a brave new world of technology unfolding; fellow engineers were building the Panama Canal (1904-1914) using steam trains and steam shovels that could move more dirt in an hour than a hundred farmers with shovels could move in a day. Scientists just figure out how the world works; engineers figure out how to make it work better. (or so they hope).
So within their first half-decade the Reclamation Service engineers were drawn toward larger projects that, in effect, would ‘correct’ the inefficiency and maddening variability of the river: the Roosevelt Dam up in the Salt River canyons storing the spring flood for release to irrigators throughout the whole growing season; a concrete weir dam all the way across the lower Colorado River to keep the late summer flows up to the headgate of the Laguna Irrigation Project near Yuma; a five-mile tunnel from the Black Canyon of the Gunnison River to the water-short (or over-developed) Uncompahgre Valley – all three projects begun in 1905-6.
Gunnison Tunnel via the National Park Service
Evolving concrete technology, and the evolving internal combustion engine made them dream of even larger projects, addressing all the natural challenges posed by Dellenbaugh’s ‘veritable dragon.’ In 1907 the Reclamation Service separated from the U.S. Geological Survey and became an independent bureau in the Department of Interior. This separation was more than just a name change; they also began to work independently of John Wesley Powell’s scientific rigor practiced in the Geological Survey.
U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist Eugene Clyde La Rue takes notes (top) while in camp on Diamond Creek, a tributary to the Colorado River in Arizona, in 1923. La Rue (bottom; standing in water) measures river discharge along Havasu Creek, another tributary in Arizona, also in 1923. Click image for larger version. Credit: Both: U.S. Geological Survey
This became a background issue when the seven states of the Colorado River Basin gathered in 1922 to try to work out an equitable division of the river among themselves. Knowledge of the actual flow of the river was sketchy. Rough measures of the flow at a Yuma gauge only went back to the mid-1890s, and gave an average in the wild annual fluctuations of just under 18 million acre-feet (maf). But a Geological Survey scientist, E. C. LaRue, had studied tree rings and other evidence, and argued that the river was just in a very wet spell, that the longer-term average flow of the river was probably well under 15 maf, maybe as low as 10-12 maf (what it appears to be today). He also cautioned that extensive storage in desert reservoirs would exact a large toll in reservoir evaporation; there would be more water available for use, but the tradeoff would be less water overall.
LaRue – John Wesley Powell’s kind of scientist – offered to consult with the Compact Commission; but nobody really wanted to hear what he was known for saying, and his offer was ignored by Chairman Herbert Hoover (an engineer). But a constant advisory presence at the compact planning meetings was Reclamation Commissioner Arthur Powell Davis, another engineer and an active participant in discussion leading to the commission accepting the Bureau figures, and deciding that a ‘temporary equitable division’ of 15 maf between an upper and lower basin was a reasonably conservative division, leaving enough uncommitted water for ‘those men who may come after us, possessed of a far greater fund of information, [to] make a further division of the river.’
Current water mavens Eric Kuhn and John Fleck wrote a well-researched book,Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River, detailing this decision to ignore solid USGS science in drafting the compact. A more mythic summary of what happened probably lies in desert poet Mary Austin’s recollection of a legend about the Hassayampa River, a Colorado River tributary; if anyone drinks its water, according to the legend, they will ‘no more see fact as naked fact, but all radiant with the color of romance.’ Whatever was in the Hassayampa’s water may have infiltrated the entire Colorado River in the 20th century.
Basically, the Bureau of Reclamation, with all the emerging technology and its vision of ‘making the desert bloom,’ was itching to take on the ‘veritable dragon.’ The ‘Romance of Exploration’ had uncovered a rampaging river whose waters were needed for American advancement; the ‘Romance of Conquest’ was the obvious next step, and science just based on the ‘naked facts’ no longer seemed to dictate the limits of the possible. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. That may not have been so baldly stated until 2004, but it was the driving theme of the 20th century – first in America, then globally.
President Franklin Roosevelt at dedication of Boulder (now Hoover) Dam, September 30, 1935
The Romance of Conquest began with the three 1905-6 projects, but shifted into high gear with the Boulder Canyon Project, created by Congress in 1929 following ratification of the Colorado River Compact – almost simultaneously with the onset of the Great Depression. The Project became practically the nation’s only bright light in the early 1930s, and became a template for much of Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal.’
The centerpiece of the Boulder Canyon Project was Hoover Dam, the largest dam project ever undertaken anywhere, capable of storing almost two years of the river’s flow, and as it released water on demand from the ‘desert bloomers’ downstream, it would generate enough electricity to handle most of the Southwest’s power demand at that time. But while the big dam was being built, the Bureau was also building the Imperial Weir Dam 180 miles downstream, to diverting more than three million acre-feetof water into the All-American Canal for an 80-mile trip to the Imperial Valley where crops could be grown year round. And between those two huge works, the Bureau was also overseeing construction of Parker Dam (not officially part of the Boulder Canyon Project) to pool up water for a 250-mile aqueduct a Metropolitan Water District was building to carry domestic water to California’s burgeoning south coast cities.
All of that was completed by 1941 – a massive coordinated regional development: food, water and power for cities that quickly became an industrial force in the winning of World War II. And it was all done on budget, and on time, organized by an agency created only forty years earlier to help small new farming communities build local irrigation systems.
And I’m going to pause there, at the moment of the Bureau’s triumph, and pick up the rest of the story of the Romance of Conquest in the next post here. Stay tuned.
The California Aqueduct, San Joaquin Valley, California. Sources/Usage: Public Domain.
The Bureau of Reclamation’s latest forecast for the Colorado River predicts Lake Powell will “most probably” drop below the critical minimum power pool level before the end of this year, jeopardizing Glen Canyon Dam’s structural integrity. In the worst-case scenario, it would do so before summer’s end. This could force the feds to operate the dam as a “run-of-the-river” operation to preserve the dam’s infrastructure and hydropower output, which would significantly diminish downstream flows and threaten Lower Basin water supplies.
Lake Powell could receive only half the normal amount of water from upstream rivers and streams this year, according to a recent federal study.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation releases a monthly study that forecasts good, bad and most likely storage conditions for the Colorado River Basin’s key reservoirs over the next two years. The February forecast expects about 52%, or about 5 million acre-feet, of the normal amount of water to flow into Lake Powell by September. The more grim outlook says Powell’s inflows could be 3.52 million acre-feet or 37% of the average from 1991 to 2020.
It’s enough to spike concerns about hydropower generation at Glen Canyon Dam — which controls releases from Powell — prompt discussions about emergency releases from upstream reservoirs and trigger federal actions to slow the pace of water out of the reservoir.
“I think they’re going to be nervous about operating the turbines,” said Eric Kuhn, former general manager for the Colorado River Water Conservation District.
In January, about 79% of the 30-year average flowed into Lake Powell — which is on the Utah-Arizona border — from upstream areas of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, according to the federal February 24-month study, released Friday.
The February projections also showed even less water flowing into Lake Powell, a decline of about 1.5 million acre-feet since January.
The Colorado River Basin, which provides water to 40 million people, has been plagued by a 25-year drought that drained its main reservoirs — the largest in the nation — to historic lows amid unyielding human demands.
And that stress is going to continue. The most probable forecast shows nothing but below-average flows in February — 71% of the 30-year average — and for April through July, when flows are likely to be 38% of the norm.
Feds take action to boost Powell
Upstream states like Colorado do not get a drop of water from Lake Powell, Kuhn said. Coloradans rely mostly on local reservoirs to help pace the spring runoff and support year-round water use.
But the reservoir’s status can impact whether upstream reservoirs, like Flaming Gorge in Wyoming and Blue Mesa in Colorado, will have to make emergency releases to elevate water levels in Lake Powell.
In response to the dry and warm winter, the federal government is trying to keep the water in the reservoir above certain critical water levels, according to the study.
At 3,490 feet in elevation, Glen Canyon Dam can no longer send Powell’s water through its penstocks and turbines to generate hydroelectric power — that would remove a cheap, renewable and reliable power source for communities across the West.
Lake Powell is projected to drop below the critical elevation by December, or as soon as August in one scenario, according to the 24-month study.
Federal officials are likely to call for emergency water releases from upstream reservoirs to keep Powell’s water level from falling to that point. They’re working to maintain a cushion by keeping Powell’s water level above 3,525 feet, or at the very least 3,500 feet in elevation, according to the study.
Lake Powell’s elevation was just over 3,532 feet as of Monday, but it’s expected to drop to 3,497 feet by Sept. 30 under the most likely forecast. (The minimum forecast puts it closer to 3,469 feet.)
Putting himself in the Bureau of Reclamation’s shoes, Kuhn would be looking upstream to fill that gap.
“Where do they plan for it?” he said. “I would be looking to get a lot of water if I’m going to keep Lake Powell above 3,500. … 3,525 may not be possible. There just may not be enough water in the system.”
Facing new lows
That is partly because the Bureau of Reclamation is required by a 2007 agreement, which expires this fall, to release certain amounts of water each year based on reservoir elevations. Replacing these rules is the focus of ongoing high-stakes — and deadlocked — negotiations among states.
Powell’s releases are expected to be 7.48 million acre-feet between Oct. 1, 2025, and Sept. 30, according to the February 24-month study.
To try to keep reservoir levels up, the Bureau of Reclamation has adjusted its normal releases since December to keep about 600,000 acre-feet of water in the reservoir. That water will eventually be released downstream as required by the 2007 rules.
Federal officials could also release less than 7.48 million acre-feet this year to keep more water in Lake Powell, according to the study. A 2024 short-term agreement allows the officials to release as little as 6 million acre-feet of water this year to avoid Lake Powell falling below 3,500 feet.
Lake Powell’s lowest release was about 2.43 million acre-feet in 1964, when the reservoir was first being filled. Since 2000, when the basin dipped into the ongoing 25-year drought, Powell’s average annual release has been 8.69 million acre-feet, according to The Sun’s analysis of water release data.
“I don’t think they’re going to release 7.48 this year. I think they have to cut the flow down to 7 (million acre-feet) or even below,” Kuhn said.
A team of nine CPW staff walked stretches of the river channel and collected as many fish as they could on Monday, Feb. 16. CPW staff reported ‘too many dead fish for the team to collect them all.’ Credit: CPW
Rio Grande Headwaters Restoration Project work near Del Norte results in 7.2-mile stretch of the river being dried up; biologists say it could take three to five years to recover the fishery
Colorado Parks and Wildlife has confirmed a “large-scale fish kill” along the Rio Grande below Del Norte that was the result of a 7.2-mile stretch of the river being dried up as part of a river restoration project.
The Rio Grande Headwaters Restoration Project has its Farmers Union Canal Diversion and Headgate Improvement project underway in the area. During construction on this project a decision was made that caused the ecological disaster.
A significant number of the fish populations in this stretch died across all age classes. Brown and rainbow trout as small as two inches and up to 24 inches have been found, along with all sizes in between. Credit: CPW
On Monday, a team of nine CPW staff walked stretches of the river channel and collected as many fish as they could, said John Livingston, southwest region public information officer for CPW.
“There were too many dead fish for the team to collect them all,” Livingston said in an email exchange with Alamosa Citizen.
The state agency was notified by a landowner on Feb. 3 that the north branch of the Rio Grande east of Del Norte was being dewatered, and fish were dying or dead.
Through its investigation, CPW determined that the species impacted include sportfish such as brown trout and rainbow trout, brook stickleback, longnose dace, fathead minnow and white sucker. Additional species such as northern leopard frogs and aquatic invertebrates such as mayflies, caddisflies and stoneflies, among others have also been found dead, according to Livingston.
“A significant number of the fish populations in that stretch died across all age classes. Brown and rainbow trout as small as two inches and up to 24 inches have been found, along with all sizes in between,” he said.
Brown trout spawn in the fall and this year’s eggs that were laid in the rocky bottoms of the river most likely have been lost, CPW reported.
“CPW faces challenging conditions to determine how many fish perished from the rapid dewatering. Many dead fish have also been scavenged by birds, raccoons, skunks, and foxes flocking to the area and others have been isolated in frozen pools,” Livingston said.
The Rio Grande Headwaters Restoration Project has its Farmers Union Canal Diversion and Headgate Improvement project underway in the area. Credit: CPW
Farmers familiar with the project told Alamosa Citizen a “hasty decision” was made to move ahead on the project during a cold spell this winter, resulting in the drying of the river through private corridors of the Rio Grande.
“There’s a lot happening behind the scenes to remedy this. Landowners are pissed,” one rancher told the Citizen.
CPW is concerned about the fish kill and potential impacts to other species, such as amphibians and aquatic invertebrates, and the potential impacts to the riparian corridor. An aboriginal population of Rio Grande chub, a Tier 1 Species of Greatest Conservation Need, has been documented in this reach of the Rio Grande, according to state parks and wildlife.
“This stretch of river is habitat for the federally endangered southwestern willow flycatcher and the federally threatened western yellow-billed cuckoo. While flycatchers and cuckoos do not overwinter in this reach, they rely on this habitat for nesting and rearing their young every spring and summer,” said Livingston.
Fish have been isolated in frozen pools. Credit: CPW
Aquatic biologists estimate it could take three to five years to recover the fishery, he said.
“CPW wants to thank the landowners along the river for their cooperation and for providing access to the river for this investigation, and CPW shares their concerns regarding this incident,” Livingston said.
Alamosa Citizen is seeking comment on this from Daniel Boyes, executive director of the Rio Grande Restoration Project.
Stratospheric aerosol injection, (SAI), is a theoretical solar geoengineering proposal that involves dispersing sulfate (or other reflective particles) into the stratosphere to reflect a portion of incoming sunlight back into space. Research into delivery methods focuses on platforms capable of reaching the stratosphere, which begins at varying altitudes depending on the latitude. Proposals range from spraying reflective particles, such as sulfur dioxides, finely powdered salt or calcium carbonate, from aircraft or high-flying balloons. None of these solar geo-engineering strategies address the underlying causes of climate change. Instead, they aim to control the amount of incoming solar radiation by emulating the sulfur-rich dust cloud that remains in the atmosphere after large volcanic eruptions.1
Proof of Concept provided by Mt. Pinatubo
The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo injected approximately 17 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, creating a global layer of sulfuric acid haze that significantly increased the Earth’s albedo. This aerosol veil reflected incoming solar radiation back into space, resulting in a measurable drop in global mean temperatures of approximately 0.5°C (0.9°F) between 1992 and 1993. This transient cooling effect temporarily offset the trend of anthropogenic global warming and disrupted global precipitation patterns, demonstrating the profound impact that volcanic stratospheric aerosols can have on the Earth’s energy balance.2
According to one study, by sending specially designed high-altitude airplanes on roughly 4,000 total sulfate injection missions a year, humans could replicate this same level of cooling. This has the potential to offset half of the warming expected over the study’s 15-year period and counteract billions of metric tons of CO2 emissions each year. At a cost of around $2 billion annually, even medium-sized economies could afford such a program. This price tag would also be far less expensive than the potential impacts of climate change. Take the United States: the 2018 US National Climate Assessment Report estimates the impacts of climate change damages will amount to “hundreds of billions of dollars annually” by 2090, making atmospheric sulfate injection an appealing solution.3
Aerial platforms under consideration
Large commercial or military transport aircraft: These could potentially be retrofitted with specialized tanks and nozzle systems. However, most standard aircraft have flight ceilings that only reach the lower stratosphere, particularly near the poles.
Specialized Research Planes: Aircraft designed for high-altitude atmospheric research, such as those used by space agencies, can reach the higher altitudes (around 20 km) often cited as optimal for SAI. These generally have limited payload capacities.
Purpose-Built High-Altitude Jets: Many researchers suggest that a new class of specialized aircraft would be necessary for efficient, large-scale delivery. These designs would require high-lift wings and engines capable of sustained operation in thin air while carrying heavy payloads of aerosol precursors.
High-Altitude Balloons: Tethered or free-floating balloons have been proposed as a lower-cost method to loft materials into the stratosphere, though they face challenges related to stability and large-scale operational control.4
Potential benefits
Rapid Global Cooling: SAI can lower global average temperatures much faster than carbon removal methods. Historical volcanic eruptions, like Mount Pinatubo in 1991, have proven that atmospheric sulfur can cool the planet by roughly 0.5°C within a year.
Cost-Effectiveness: Compared to the trillions needed for a full green energy transition, SAI is estimated to cost between $18 billion and $27 billion per year using modified aircraft.
Life-Saving Potential: Some studies suggest SAI could save up to 400,000 lives annually by reducing heat-related mortality in the world’s hottest regions.
Glacial Preservation: By lowering surface temperatures, it could slow sea-level rise and prevent the melting of land-based glaciers and sea ice.
Reversibility: Unlike permanent carbon storage, SAI effects are temporary; if stopped, the aerosols naturally fall out of the atmosphere within 1–2 years.5
Potential risks
Termination Shock: If SAI is suddenly stopped (due to war, terrorism, or political collapse) while greenhouse gases are still high, the planet would experience a catastrophic and rapid temperature spike.
Ozone Depletion: Injecting sulfates can damage the stratospheric ozone layer, increasing harmful UV radiation and risks of skin cancer.
Disrupted Weather Patterns: Models indicate it could cause regional droughts, specifically by weakening the South Asian monsoon and reducing tropical rainfall.
Ocean Acidification: SAI only masks temperature; it does not reduce CO2 levels. The oceans would continue to absorb carbon, leading to acidification that destroys coral reefs and marine life.
Moral Hazard: The availability of a “quick fix” might reduce the political and corporate incentive to actually cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Geopolitical Conflict: There is no international governance for SAI. A single country could “control the thermostat,” potentially leading to global conflict if their actions cause weather disasters elsewhere.
Ecological Impacts: Reduced direct sunlight could decrease crop yields and interfere with solar power generation.6
After a few warm and dry weeks, heavy precipitation returned to the West Coast States this past week; however, the heaviest amounts fell on California, which is almost completely free of dryness and drought. At least 1.5 inches fell on a large part of the state including much of the western tier, the higher elevations, and the northern Valleys. Much larger amounts fell on isolated higher-elevation and orographically-favored locations, with a few spots recording amounts approaching 10 inches (liquid-equivalent). Several feet of snow has piled up on a few spots across the Sierra Nevada, but overall the snowpack in this area remains significantly below normal. Other areas from northwestern California northward through the Cascades and points west also recorded significant amounts of precipitation, ranging from 0.5 to locally 3.0 inches. Similar amounts were more scattered across the rest of the interior West, with the largest totals confined to the highest elevations. As of early Tuesday Feb 17, this precipitation has not significantly boosted snowpack in some areas with less than normal amounts, specifically much of the Cascades, south-central Idaho, Scattered locations across western Wyoming, much of west-central and southwestern Colorado, central sections of Utah and Nevada, and the southernmost Rockies.
Farther east, moderate precipitation was fairly widespread over approximately the southeastern quarter of the contiguous states, east of the High Plains and from the central Great Plains, lower Ohio Valley, and mid-Atlantic region southward. Heavier amounts fell on scattered areas across the east-central and southeastern Great Plains, parts of the adjacent lower Mississippi Valley, and a few narrow swaths across the western Florida Panhandle and parts of the northern Peninsula. To the north, scattered light amounts with isolated moderate totals were recorded in upstate New York and parts of New England. Other areas across the High Plains and the northeastern quarter of the contiguous states reported little or no precipitation.
Some areas of improvement were introduced based either on this past week’s precipitation or a re-assessment of the effects from earlier storms. Specifically, improvements were introduced in central Idaho, the southwestern High Plains, and parts of the Tennessee, lower Ohio, and middle Mississippi Valleys. There was more deterioration than improvement overall, however, including areas scattered across the Eastern Seaboard, lower Mississippi Valley, Deep South, Upper Midwest, northern High Plains, and far southern Texas. Hawaii experienced areas of improvement for the second consecutive week while Alaska and most dry areas in Puerto Rico remained unchanged…
Moderate to locally heavy precipitation fell on part of eastern Kansas, and scattered light to moderate amounts fell on the rest of the southern tier of the Region. Farther north, however, scant precipitation led to large areas of degradation across a large proportion of Wyoming and central through eastern Montana, with more limited deterioration introduced across parts of Nebraska and South Dakota. This resulted in moderate drought or worse covering a swath across most of Nebraska and adjacent areas westward through most of Wyoming and the northern, central, and western sections of Colorado. Severe drought (D2) or worse is widespread from western Nebraska across the southern tier of Wyoming through northern and central parts of Colorado…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending February 17, 2026.
Heavy precipitation was fairly widespread across California, which is currently almost completely devoid of any degree of dryness or drought. Elsewhere, widespread deterioration was introduced across central and eastern Montana, leaving most of the state entrenched in abnormal dryness to severe drought (D0 to D2), with an area of extreme drought in parts of north-central Montana. Elsewhere, only minor adjustments were made as light to moderate precipitation fell on a large part of the areas of dryness and drought – enough to preclude widespread deterioration, but not sufficient to justify much improvement. Only a few parts of central and south-central New Mexico were improved, primarily from the effects of precipitation prior to last week. Severe to extree drought (D2-D3) now extends across most of the western half of New Mexico, adjacent4 Arizona, central and northern Utah, parts of northern and southwestern Idaho, and parts of Pacific Northwest east of the Cascades…
Heavy precipitation (3 to locally 5 inches) dropped on a swath through central Arkansas while 1.5 to locally 3.0 inches were recorded from the lower Red River (south) Valley through the central tier of Arkansas into much of western Tennessee. Moderate to locally heavy amounts were observed over much of the west side of the lower Mississippi Valley and portions of eastern Texas. Amounts of several tenths of an inch to locally around an inch were reported across a large part of central and north-central Texas, most of Oklahoma east of the Panhandle, much of Mississippi and western Alabama, and eastern sections of Tennessee. Little or no precipitation was reported across the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles, western Texas, and Deep South Texas. This pattern supported improvement across the western half of Tennessee and smaller areas of Arkansas and northwestern Mississippi, along with scattered spots across southern Oklahoma. Deterioration was fairly common in areas that missed most of the week’s precipitation, primarily in the lower Mississippi Valley, the immediate ArkLaTex region, and Deep South Texas. Intensifying dryness in the latter area prompted the introduction of exceptional drought (D4) in parts of Jim Hogg and Brooks Counties. D4 already existed in part of interior northeastern Arkansas and the southernmost reaches of the Texas Big Bend. Meanwhile, extreme drought (D3) expanded to cover most of south-central and Deep South Texas, parts of east-central Louisiana and adjacent Mississippi, portions of southern Oklahoma and northeastern Texas, most of northeastern Arkansas, and a few smaller scattered areas in western Arkansas and northeastern Oklahoma. During the past 90 days, fewer than 2 inches of precipitation have fallen on western Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, and the southwestern tier of Texas from the Big Bend into much of Deep South Texas…
Looking Ahead
The heaviest precipitation over the next few days is forecast along and near part of the West Coast, with at least 2 inches expected across northwestern California, the southern Cascades, and the central and northern Sierra Nevada. Up to 7 inches may fall in isolated higher elevations, most or all of which would be snow. Meanwhile, moderate to heavy amounts (0.5 to 2.0 inches) are forecast across Washington and Oregon from the Cascades westward. Similar amounts are forecast for the northern Great Lakes, and most locations from the Deep South through central New England, with lesser amounts expected over much of the central and northern Carolinas. There is a lot of uncertainty in this area, depending on the development and track of an East Coast storm system that could affect the mid-Atlantic and lower Northeast over the weekend. Light to moderate totals are anticipated over a large part of the interior West, including the Great Basin, much of the northern Intermountain West, and the higher elevations across the Rockies. Several tenths of an inch are possible across the lower Great Lakes, middle and lower Ohio Valley, and the east side of the lower Mississippi Valley. Little or no precipitation is expected across the northern and southern Plains, southern Florida, and northern Maine. Above-normal temperatures are expected from the Southwest through most of the Plains, with many locations expected to average 5 to 11 deg. F above normal. In contrast, subnormal temperatures are forecast in the northernmost Plains, where daily highs could average as much as 9 deg. F below normal. Meanwhile, 5-day average anomalies are expected to range from -2 to -5 deg. F across northern California as well as the Ohio Valley and many locations farther east.
The 6- to 10-day outlook for February 24-28 depicts increased chances for below-normal precipitation across much of the southern tier of the contiguous U.S., from the extreme southern Rockies through the central Gulf Coast and most of Florida. Chances for abnormal dryness exceed 40 percent across most of Texas and some adjacent areas. Farther north, heavier than normal precipitation is at least nominally favored from the mid-Atlantic, southern Appalachians, central Plains, and Desert Southwest northward to the Canadian border. Chances for unusually unsettled weather exceed 60 percent across central and northern California, and top 50 percent central California northward across western Washington and Oregon, as well as the middle and lower Ohio Valley. In Alaska, drier than normal conditions are favored along western parts of the state while surplus amounts are more likely over eastern areas. Across Hawaii, above-normal amounts are marginally favored statewide. Meanwhile, warmer than normal weather is expected to dominate the contiguous 48 states from the Appalachians to the Intermountain West, with chances for significantly warmer than normal conditions topping 80 percent in western Texas. Areas somewhat favoring below-normal temperatures are restricted to the West Coast west of the Cascades, and over much of the Florida Peninsula. Considerably higher chances for unusually cold weather cover most of Alaska, reaching above 70 percent in southwestern parts of the state. In contrast, warmer than normal conditions are somewhat favored across Hawaii, especially across Kauai, Oahu, and the southern Big Island.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending February 17, 2026.
The Bureau of Reclamation’s latest forecast for the Colorado River predicts Lake Powell will “most probably” drop below the critical minimum power pool level before the end of this year, jeopardizing Glen Canyon Dam’s structural integrity. In the worst-case scenario, it would do so before summer’s end. This could force the feds to operate the dam as a “run-of-the-river” operation to preserve the dam’s infrastructure and hydropower output, which would significantly diminish downstream flows and threaten Lower Basin water supplies.
Valentines Day wasn’t so lovey-dovey on the Colorado River.
First, the Bureau of Reclamation (BoR) released a grimmer-than-ever spring runoff forecast for the Colorado River and its two big reservoirs. Then the seven Colorado River Basin states announced that they once again had failed to reach an agreement on a plan to bring demand into line with diminishing supplies by the Feb. 14 deadline. While the states have blown by other deadlines since negotiations began in 2022, this time was different in that it triggered the federal government to move forward to impose a post-2026 management plan of its own.
On paper, the states still have until the end of the water year, or Oct. 1, to come up with a deal or to implement an alternate plan. But that may be too little too late to keep Lake Powell’s surface level from dropping below minimum power pool — otherwise known as de facto dead pool — later this year. While the negotiations are over the Colorado River, or rather the water in the river, in many ways they pivot around the need to keep Lake Powell’s surface level above 3,500 feet in elevation. That can only be done by releasing less water out of Glen Canyon Dam, or increasing flows into the reservoir, or a bit of both.
The sticking point in the negotiations hinges upon whether the Upper Basin states will take mandatory and verifiable cuts in water use. The Lower Basin states have already taken cuts, and have agreed to take more, but only if the Upper Basin does the same.
The Upper Basin (aka the Headwaters states) points out that while the Lower Basin has maxed out and even exceeded its Colorado River Compact allocation of 7.5 million acre-feet per year, the Upper Basin hasn’t even come close to using all of the water it’s entitled to. Furthermore, Upper Basin water users, especially those with more junior water rights, have grappled with drastic reductions during dry years because the Upper Basin lacks large reservoirs for storing water, meaning their water use is dictated in large part by the rivers’ flows. In 2021, for example, many southwestern Colorado farms had their ditches cut off as early as June, forcing them to sit the season out.
The Lower Basin states long used their entire 7.5 MAF allocation and then some, while the Upper Basin states use only about 4 MAF per year. In recent years, Arizona and California have cut consumptive use. Source: Bureau of Reclamation.
It’s also far simpler logistically to reduce consumption in the Lower Basin, where huge water users are served by a handful of very large diversions, such as the Central Arizona Project canal (which carries water to Phoenix and Tucson), the All-American Canal (serving the Imperial Irrigation District — the largest single water user on the entire river), and the California Aqueduct (serving Los Angeles and other cities), all of which are fed by Lake Mead and other reservoirs. Dialing back those three diversions alone could achieve the necessary water use reduction. The Upper Basin, on the other hand, pulls water from the river and its tributaries via hundreds of much smaller diversions; achieving meaningful cuts would require shutting off thousands of irrigation ditches to thousands of small water users under dubious authority. (ed. emphasis mine]
Also, proposals to divert and consume more of the Colorado River’s water — such as the Lake Powell pipeline — remain on the table, albeit tenuously. If that project were to be realized, which is a big if these days, it would further drain Lake Powell and result in even less water flowing down to the Lower Basin.
The Imperial Irrigation District is the largest single water user on the Colorado River by far. Most of that water goes to irrigating agriculture, including a fair amount of alfalfa and other forage crops. Las Vegas uses about one-tenth the amount of water as the IID. Source: Bureau of Reclamation.
Environmental groups tend to side with the Lower Basin on this issue. If the Upper Basin is forced to pull less water from the river, it would leave more water for the river, riparian ecosystems along the river, and aquatic critters. The Upper Basin’s proposal to release a percentage of the river’s “natural flow” from Glen Canyon Dam would leave less water in the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, possibly imperiling endangered fish and rafting.
Meanwhile, the states’ lack of consensus pushes Glen Canyon Dam closer to the brink of deadpool.
The BoR’s “Post-2026 Operational Guidelines and Strategies for Lake Powell and Lake Mead” offers five alternative scenarios for how to run the river. While it doesn’t give a “preferred” alternative, officials have indicated that without all of the states’ approval or congressional action, they are only authorized to go with the Basic Coordination Alternative. That would include a minimum annual release of 7.0 million acre-feet from Glen Canyon Dam, with the largest mandatory cuts being borne by Arizona. But according to the BoR’s latest 24 month projection, that release level would lead to Lake Powell’s surface level dropping below minimum power pool by the end of this year, which is a really big problem.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
Back in 2022, as climate change continued to diminish the Colorado River’s flows and Lake Powell shrunk to alarmingly low levels, the dam’s operators were faced with the prospect of having to shut down the penstocks, or water intakes for the hydroelectric turbines, and only release water from the river outlets lower on the dam. Not only would this zero out electricity production from the dam, along with nixing up to $200 million in revenue from selling that power, it might also compromise the dam itself. “Glen Canyon Dam was not envisioned to operate solely through the outworks for an extended period of time,” wrote Tanya Trujillo, then-Interior Department assistant secretary for water and science, in 2022, “and operating at this low lake level increases risks to water delivery and potential adverse impacts to downstream resources and infrastructure. … Glen Canyon Dam facilities face unprecedented operational reliability challenges.”
In March 2024, a BoR technical decision memorandum verified and clarified those risks, and recommended that dam operators “not rely on the river outlet works as the sole means for releasing water from Glen Canyon Dam.”
The only way to do that is to keep the water level above 3,490 feet in elevation, which could mean shifting Glen Canyon Dam to a run of the river operation — where releases equal Lake Powell inflows minus evaporation and seepage — as soon as this fall. That, most likely, will lead to annual releases far below 7 million acre-feet, which will then lead to Lake Mead’s level being drawn down considerably as the Lower Basin states rely on existing storage to meet their needs, thereby threatening Lower Basin supplies. Such a scenario is clearly not sustainable, would put the Upper Basin states in violation of the Colorado River Compact1, and would almost certainly lead to litigation.
An irony here is that Glen Canyon Dam’s primary purpose is to allow the Upper Basin to store water during wet years and release it during dry years, enabling it to meet its Compact obligations. Hydropower, silt control, and recreation were secondary purposes. Now the need to preserve the dam could cause the Upper Basin to run afoul of the Compact. Aridification is rendering the dam obsolete, at least as a water storage savings account. Meanwhile, low levels are diminishing hydropower and recreation. It seems that soon, the dam’s main purpose will be to prevent Lake Mead from filling up with silt. [ed. emphasis mine]
Mother Nature, or Mother Megadrought, if you prefer, has left few options for moving forward. The states still could come to an agreement, but it’s difficult to see how, given the long-running stalemate so far. The feds could reengineer Glen Canyon Dam to allow for sustained, low-water releases. That would only be a temporary fix, however, unless climatic trends reverse themselves and the West suddenly becomes much wetter and cooler. Somehow, that doesn’t seem too likely.
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
Is all of this Colorado River talk a bit confusing? Do you find yourself lost in the water-wonk weeds? Yeah, me too. That’s why I put together the Land Desk’s Colorado River glossary and primer. It’s not behind the paywall yet, so even you free-riders can take a look for the next few days. It’s worth looking at even if you already received the email edition last month, because it is now updated with new terms and more graphics (it didn’t all fit in the email version). I’ll keep updating it, too, as new questions about what it all means come up. And if you’re not already, you should consider becoming a paid subscriber and break down the archive paywall, allowing you to read the whole list of analysis, commentary, and data dumps I’ve done on the Colorado River over the last five years.
1 The Upper Basin and Lower Basin generally disagree on how to interpret the Colorado River Compact’s provision dictating that the Upper Basin “not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75 million acre-feet” for any 10-year period. The Upper Basin sees it as a “non-depletion obligation,” meaning they can’t exceed their 7.5 MAF/year allocation if it causes the Lee Ferry flow to fall below a 7.5 MAF/year average. The Lower Basin believes it’s a “delivery obligation,” and that the Upper Basin must deliver 7.5 MAF/year no matter what. Which interpretation is correct determines whether run-of-the-river would violate the Compact or not.
The Colorado River Basin spans seven U.S. states and part of Mexico. Lake Powell, upstream from the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, are the two principal reservoirs in the Colorado River water-supply system. (Bureau of Reclamation)
The Government Highline Canal, near Grand Junction, delivers water from the Colorado River, and is managed by the Grand Valley Water Users Association. Prompted by concerns about outside investors speculating on Grand Valley water, the state convened a work group to study the issue. CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
February 17, 2026
Negotiators from the seven states along the Colorado River blew past yet another federal deadline over the weekend without reaching a compromise on how to share its water — even as this winter’s dismal snowpack could spell immediate disaster for the river system.
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map February 18, 2026.
Years-long discussions about how to split the river’s shrinking water supply, which is relied upon by 40 million people, remained deadlocked as the Saturday deadline for a final deal came and went. It was a deadline set by the U.S. Department of the Interior. The seven basin states are split into two factions that have not agreed on how to divvy up cuts to water supplies in dry years. The Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada lie downstream of Lakes Powell and Mead and rely on releases from those reservoirs for water. The Upper Basin states — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico — are upstream of the reservoirs and primarily depend on mountain snowpack for their water supplies. Leaders from each basin pointed fingers at the other as the deadline passed. Lower Basin negotiators have repeatedly said that Upper Basin states must “share the pain” and take mandatory cuts in dry years, which have become increasingly common in recent decades. But the Upper Basin states say their water users already take cuts every year because their supplies depend on the amount of water available and are not propped up by supplies in Lakes Powell and Mead. Repeated overuse in the Lower Basin has drained the two reservoirs, they’ve argued.
“We’re being asked to solve a problem we didn’t create with water we don’t have,” Colorado’s negotiator, Becky Mitchell, said in a statement Friday. “The Upper Division’s approach is aligned with hydrologic reality and we’re ready to move forward.”
The Bureau of Reclamation’s latest forecast for the Colorado River predicts Lake Powell will “most probably” drop below the critical minimum power pool level before the end of this year, jeopardizing Glen Canyon Dam’s structural integrity. In the worst-case scenario, it would do so before summer’s end. This could force the feds to operate the dam as a “run-of-the-river” operation to preserve the dam’s infrastructure and hydropower output, which would significantly diminish downstream flows and threaten Lower Basin water supplies.
As political leaders unleashed a series of pointed statements Friday, the Bureau of Reclamation released new projections that show one of the river system’s major reservoirs could be in peril as soon as this summer. The bureau’s new projections show that, if drought conditions remain dire, Lake Powell could fall so low by the end of July that water would no longer flow through Glen Canyon Dam’s hydropower system — a level called “dead pool.” Even if snow conditions improve, the reservoir could still reach dead pool in November — a scenario the bureau dubbed its most probable outcome. The Colorado River District, an agency created by the Colorado legislature that’s based in Glenwood Springs and advocates for Western Slope water needs, said it was disappointing that Lower Basin negotiators walked away from discussions on the day the projections were released.
“With Lake Powell now quickly approaching dead pool, that decision reflects a continued disconnect from hydrologic reality and a clear refusal to confront the core problem: longstanding Lower Basin overuse,” the district said Monday in a statement.
Snowpack across the mountains that feed the Colorado River remained dismal in early February. Above Lake Powell, snowpack on Feb. 1 sat at 47% of the median recorded for that time of year between 1991 and 2020. The water year — which began Oct. 1 — has so far featured record-setting warmth and limited precipitation, according to the National Weather Service’sColorado Basin River Forecast Center. That could translate to water supplies at 38% of normal, according to the center. Current projections show inflow into Lake Powell will total a meager 2.4 million acre-feet — far less than the 7.5 million acre-feet allocated to the Lower Basin in the 1922 Colorado River Compact.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
While climate change and the general lack of precipitation are the most obvious causes of the aridification of the American West, there are other factors taking place in the background that are contributing to this process.
The ever-expanding southwestern shoreline of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Photo credit: Robert Marcos
Dust on Snow: Windblown dust from disturbed desert soils and dry lake beds—such as the Great Salt Lake—settles on mountain snowpacks. This “dark topcoat” reduces reflectivity (albedo), causing snow to absorb more solar heat and melt up to three to seven weeks earlier than clean snow. This premature runoff often reaches reservoirs when they are already full or when the ground is still too frozen for agricultural use, effectively wasting the “natural reservoir” of the snowpack.1
Vapor Pressure Deficit (VPD): Often described as the “thirst of the atmosphere,” VPD measures the difference between the moisture in the air and how much it can hold. Higher temperatures exponentially increase this demand, sucking moisture directly out of soils and plants even when precipitation levels are normal. In recent years, this “atmospheric thirst” has accounted for roughly 61% of drought severity, outweighing the impact of reduced rainfall.2
Pacific Decadal Oscillation Stagnation: The “PDO” is a long-term ocean temperature pattern that typically flips every 20 years. Since the 1990s, it has remained stuck in a “negative phase,” which brings cooler water to the eastern Pacific and pushes moisture-bearing storms farther north, away from the Southwest. Recent research suggests this prolonged “stuck” phase may be driven by human-caused aerosol and greenhouse gas emissions.3
Soil and Vegetation Feedbacks: Aridification creates a self-reinforcing cycle. As soils dry out, they lose the cooling effect of evaporation, causing solar radiation to heat the ground and the air even further. Additionally, while higher CO2 levels can make plants more water-efficient, this gain is often offset by longer growing seasons and increased plant growth, which ultimately draws more total moisture from the soil through transpiration.4
Land Use and Soil Degradation: Intensive land uses, including livestock grazing and urbanization, remove protective vegetation and destabilize soil. This not only increases wind erosion (leading to more dust-on-snow events) but also reduces the soil’s ability to absorb and retain what little moisture does fall, intensifying the “baking” of the landscape.5
Invasive plants: Cheatgrass, tamarisk, and Russian olive are invasive plants most often named as contributors to the aridification of the American West. Cheatgrass transforms diverse, deep‑rooted native shrub–grass communities into shallow‑rooted, flammable annual monocultures that dry and senesce early, it depletes shallow soil moisture sooner in the growing season, and dramatically increases fire frequency. It creates a cheatgrass–wildfire feedback loop that repeatedly removes perennial vegetation, reduces soil organic matter and carbon storage, accelerates erosion, and leaves soils warmer, drier, and less able to retain water, so landscapes lose both plant cover and hydrologic function and effectively behave more like a hotter, drier, impoverished system even when long‑term precipitation totals have not changed.6
Like much of the West, Colorado’s water future will be shaped by a warming climate, population growth, and subsequently increasing competition for finite supplies. In conversations about managing our coveted Colorado River headwater resources, it is easy to assume the most influential voices belong to the well-represented on the population-dense Front Range or the well-funded interests far downstream. Yet some of the most consequential water decisions play out in small mountain valleys, often with limited staff, limited funding, and limited political clout.
It was in that context, despite the Great Recession of 2008, that voters approved the creation of Pitkin County Healthy Rivers that November, a sales tax-funded program with a simple but ambitious mandate: protect and enhance the rivers and streams of the Western Slope’s Roaring Fork Watershed on behalf of the people and the environment.
What few imagined at the time was that this small, locally funded program would become such an effective way to ensure the people and their cherished rivers had a seat at the table in complex, high-stakes water discussions. A “seat” that is not symbolic; it’s practical, persistent and sometimes uncomfortable. Because having local voices is not a luxury — it is essential.
The Power of Showing Up
Healthy Rivers’ influence begins with showing up. Showing up ready to listen and engage, recognize partners and advance and fiscally sponsor new alliances, all while emphasizing local knowledge, data, and community-backed priorities. In basin-wide planning efforts, feasibility studies, and project negotiations, Healthy Rivers represents local, place-based interests that might otherwise get overshadowed by far more powerful players, be they up or downstream.
This has meant actively seeking valuable connections, therefore knowledge, daresay wisdom, with hopes of earning a voice that ensures headwaters perspectives are considered at these tables. Think Colorado Basin Roundtable, U.S. Forest Service, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, local and nearby watershed groups, and other environmental non-profits. This outreach has led to critical partnerships and heightened transparency and inclusivity on many water matters. It has also meant supporting technical analyses and funding early-stage studies — most recently for water-quality monitoring on Lincoln Creek, a tributary to the Roaring Fork — so local conditions and risks are understood before decisions are made elsewhere.
And because our funding comes directly from local voters, Healthy Rivers advocates from the position of our constituents who overwhelmingly supported its creation. That matters in rooms where water is discussed in acre-feet and complex legal terms, often far removed from community-specific values. This has allowed Healthy Rivers to elevate community priorities in negotiations around watershed health, elevating environmental values like instream flows.
Small Programs, Real Influence
One misconception about many local programs is that they are too small to matter. In practice, Healthy Rivers has demonstrated that being nimble is an advantage. Healthy River’s contributions are rarely flashy, but they have been catalytic, having a role in everything from diversion arbitration, instream flow protections, riparian habitat restoration, and water-quality monitoring.
It has done this by supporting projects like technical studies, restoration efforts, and infrastructure improvements that likely wouldn’t have happened otherwise. And by convening unlikely partners, and stepping into conversations early, before positions harden and options narrow.
For example, Healthy Rivers helped support the pursuit of a Recreational In-Channel Diversion (RICD) on the Roaring Fork River, recognizing instream flow rights alongside recreation as legitimate, community-defining values worthy of legal protection. It is supporting a Wild & Scenic designation for the Crystal River, and investing in beaver-related studies in order to inform projects that restore wetlands, reconnect floodplains, and improve late-season flows.
Translating Complexity for Communities
Another core part of having a seat at the table is translation. Colorado water law, hydrology, and planning processes are famously complex. Without intentional effort, these processes can leave local communities feeling confused, disengaged, or shut out of decisions that directly shape their rivers.
Healthy Rivers sees its role as a bridge. It translates technical concepts into plain language, not to oversimplify, but to make participation possible. This has included helping residents understand what designations like “Wild & Scenic” actually do — and don’t — mean, or explaining how instream flow rights function alongside agricultural and municipal uses.
This two-way translation strengthens outcomes. Decision-makers gain local context. Communities gain confidence. And water decisions become more durable because they reflect shared understanding, not just legal compliance.
Collaboration Over Confrontation
A seat at the table does not guarantee agreement. Some of the most meaningful work Healthy Rivers does happens in moments of tension, usually when water supply, ecological health, recreation, and private property interests collide.
Our approach is rooted in collaboration, not advocacy for advocacy’s sake. That means listening carefully, acknowledging tradeoffs, and being honest about constraints. But it also means pushing back when local values are at risk of being overlooked. In projects like renovating the Sam Caudill State Wildlife Area, Healthy Rivers worked alongside CPW, Garfield County, and development partners to balance recreation access, public safety, and river protection, demonstrating how infrastructure investments can serve both people and rivers.
Lessons for Other Communities
This role requires patience. Water decisions typically move slowly, and progress often comes in inches rather than miles. And in a basin as complex as the Colorado River system, no one wins by going it alone. Our experience has reinforced a simple truth: collaboration works best when local voices are present early and consistently, not as an afterthought.
While not every community can replicate Pitkin County’s funding model, the underlying principles are transferable:
Local funding creates legitimacy. Voter-backed programs carry weight because they represent collective priorities.
Consistency builds trust. Showing up over time and building long term relationships matters.
Data and stories belong together. Technical rigor and real-world experience are stronger together than apart.
Early engagement saves time later. Investing upstream — literally and figuratively — reduces conflict downstream.
Healthy Rivers exists to ensure that when decisions are made about the Roaring Fork Watershed, the people who know and love these rivers are part of the conversation. That seat at the table does not guarantee outcomes, but it guarantees presence. And in water, as in so many things, presence is power.
In the 1950s, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built the Blue Mesa, Morrow Point and Crystal dams west of Gunnison as part of the massive regional Colorado River Storage Project. The Bureau of Reclamation is currently in the process of replacing all four original valves at Blue Mesa Dam for the first time. (Photos/National Park Service)
For the first time since its completion in 1966, the Bureau of Reclamation is replacing all four original valves at Blue Mesa Dam, the largest of the three dams that make up the Aspinall Unit on the Gunnison River. This multi-year, $32 million federally funded project is a major milestone in ensuring the reliability and safety of one of Colorado’s most important water and power facilities.
Standing 390 feet tall, Blue Mesa Dam creates Blue Mesa Reservoir, the largest body of water in Colorado, with a capacity of nearly 941,000 acre-feet. Together with Morrow Point and Crystal dams, the Aspinall Unit provides water storage, flood control and hydropower generation. Blue Mesa’s power plant alone produces 86 megawatts of electricity, helping power homes and businesses across the region.
Crews help guide the removed ring follower gate to a flatbed truck so it can be transported to California for refurbishment. Reclamation photo
The project will replace two ring follower gate valves and two butterfly valves, critical components that control how water moves through Blue Mesa Dam.
Ring follower gates, located in the dam’s outlet works, allow water to bypass the turbines during maintenance or emergencies, ensuring uninterrupted flows to the Gunnison River.
Butterfly valves, located inside the penstocks, act as flow-control and isolation devices for water entering the turbines to generate hydropower.
Work began in January with the removal of the first ring follower gate, a massive assembly measuring 18 feet long by 7 feet wide and weighing about 14 tons. The hydraulic hoist system adds another 12 tons. Before safely removing the gate, crews first installed a blind flange, a heavy steel plate that temporarily seals the opening and holds back water.
The gate and its components are now in California for refurbishment and will return for installation in August. Later this fall, once irrigation demands ease, the blind flange will be removed and normal operations restored. After this first gate is complete, crews will move on to the second ring follower gate, followed by the two butterfly valves.
“This work is complex,” said Blue Mesa Plant Supervisor Eric Langely. “We must maintain minimum river flows downstream, avoid disruptions at Morrow Point and Crystal dams, and manage drought-related constraints—all while working inside a dam built nearly 60 years ago.”
The project is being led by a skilled team of Reclamation engineers, plant operators, and technical specialists. Their expertise ensures this upgrade will keep Blue Mesa Dam operating safely and efficiently for decades to come.
Crews weld the temporary blind flange into place inside Blue Mesa’s penstock. Courtesy photo/USBR)
A multi-day storm system is dropping big totals across the western U.S. this week. The Sierra Nevadas are likely to get over 3 feet of new snow, while the Interior Rockies and Cascades will see between 1-2 feet.
72-hour snowfall forecast for the western U.S., as of February 16, 2026. Map from the Weather Prediction Center.
This storm is a welcome relief for many drought-stricken areas, especially given the near record low snowpack so far this season. NRCS snowpack is below to well-below average for most of the west. A startling number of SNOTEL sites in Colorado and Utah are reporting levels below the 5th percentile (meaning they are drier than 95% of historical records for this date).
Current snowpack conditions across the western U.S. as of February 16, 2026. Map from NRCS SNOTEL.
At the Colorado Headwaters, snowpack is record low for this time of year. With only 56 days to go till normal peak snowpack, new accumulations would have to be record-breaking to get the basin to near-average levels. A much below average peak and early melt are much more likely. This has major implications for water supply, agriculture, and wildfire risk across the region.
Projected peak snowpack for the Colorado Headwaters, as of February 17, 2026. Data from NRCS.
These concerningly low snowpack accumulations are evident in the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center’s water supply forecasts. The April-July runoff forecast for Lake Powell (the Upper Colorado River Basin’s largest reservoir) is 38% of average, about a 4-million acre-foot deficit.
April-July runoff forecast for Lake Powell. Official forecast values from February 1, 2026. Data from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center.
While we can expect snowpack and forecasted runoff to improve with the current storm, the overall outlook for the season remains concerning. Additional late season snows and colder temperatures could minimize further deteriorating conditions and the risk of large wildfires this summer. Stay tuned over the next couple of months!
Climate tipping points are key thresholds in Earth systems like oceans, ice sheets, and forests, where warming can push the climate into a new state. Once crossed, these changes can be hard to reverse and can start a chain reaction that affects ecosystems, weather extremes and the global climate. Credit: ESA
If you think of Earth’s climate system as a backyard swing that’s been gently swaying for millennia, then human-caused global warming is like a sudden shove strong enough to disrupt the usual arc and buckle the chains.
And if humans keep heating the planet with greenhouse gas pollution, the climate swing could lock Earth into a hothouse trajectory, as parts of the system feed on their own momentum, even if emissions are reduced later, an international team of scientists warned Wednesday in a new paperpublished in the journal One Earth.
Their analysis covers 16 key Earth systems, including oceans, ice sheets and forests, that are likely to destabilize if the planet continues to warm. If large parts of the Amazon rainforest and tropical coral reefs die, they absorb less carbon dioxide, triggering a dangerous chain reaction of warming.
If Earth’s climate starts on a hothouse trajectory, it would represent a “global tipping point” as the heating sustains itself even if greenhouse gas emissions drop, said lead author William Ripple, a distinguished professor of ecology at Oregon State University and a leading researcher on climate tipping points.
In the backyard, that’s the moment when the push is so hard that the swing hesitates at the top, just long enough to show that the ride may not be under control anymore and the chains are being tested.
“What typically took thousands of years is now happening in decades,” Ripple said, adding that human-caused warming is already nudging the climate system out of 11,000 years of relative stability with good conditions for farming and societal development.
Earth could be entering a period of unprecedented climate change on a one-way trajectory, in which processes such as ice-sheet collapse can continue even if the average global temperature is stabilized, he said.
In a new paper, William Ripple, an ecologist and climate researcher at Oregon State University, warns that human-caused warming could put Earth on a hothouse trajectory. Credit: Courtesy of William Ripple
Recent observations suggest that the climate may be responding more strongly than some models predicted, Ripple added. “We are concerned that policymakers and the public may not yet be aware of these recent developments.”
In late January, another group of leading climate scientists urged policymakers to adopt a climate goal of limiting human-caused warming to 1 degree Celsius above the pre-fossil fuel era, which is more ambitious than the 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius target set in the Paris Agreement. They’ve also recently reported that Earth is losing its reflective sheen, which amplifies warming, and that key ocean currents are changing in ways that destabilize the entire global climate system.
But it’s not clear if the scientific warnings are making a difference in “a post-truth era in which too many people prefer pleasant lies over unpleasant truths,” said Reinhard Steurer, a professor of climate policy and governance at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna who studies how climate science and policy interact. He said that new studies outlining disastrous scenarios are unlikely to have much impact in the current political climate, but that researchers should keep speaking out, and not surrender to “techno illusions or hopium.”
The authors of the new paper stressed that a self-sustaining hothouse trajectory is not the same as a Hothouse Earth state, which would be when the global climate rebalances at a much hotter average temperature.
No Good Analog Climates
Instead of offering a single new climate forecast, the paper synthesizes decades of research revealing how different parts of the climate system influence one another. When one part of the system is destabilized, they wrote, it can amplify stress in others, pushing the planet along a self-reinforcing warming pathway.
Earth has had hothouse climates in the ancient geological past. But the authors of the new paper said there may not be a parallel to what’s happening now, at least not during the past 3 million years, co-author Johan Rockström, co-director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said via email.
That amount of warming goes beyond current expectations and would devastate ecosystems and communities globally. Many other current climate projections suggest that, under current policies, warming would level off somewhere between 2.7 and 3 degrees Celsius.
Human-caused warming is happening much faster than any other warming documented in the paleoclimate record, and it’s also unprecedented because it’s driven by a single dominant force, Rockström added: human greenhouse gas emissions. Under these conditions, research has documented that Earth is already losing some of the natural buffers that dampened climate swings in recent millennia.
“We now see worrying signs that the Earth system is losing resilience,” Rockström said. Recent extremes, he added, are a sign that the climate system “may respond more strongly to the same amount of warming than it did before.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Branson Loomis). Here’s an excerpt:
February 13, 2026
Key Points
The seven Colorado River Basins states failed to reach a shortage-sharing agreement in time for a Feb. 14 deadline set by the federal government.
State officials say negotiations have yielded “almost no headway” toward a compromise over who will give up water.
The Interior Department has said it will impose its own plan, but that prospect could trigger a lengthy legal battle as states move to protect their water allocations.
The prospect of a costly and prolonged interstate lawsuit over rights to the Colorado River looms now that the states using the water are blowing past a Valentine’s Day deadline with no water-sharing deal in hand. With no agreement among the states, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the federal government could no longer delay action and would move forward with work on a set of alternatives outlined late last year.
“Negotiation efforts have been productive,” Burgum said in a statement Feb. 14. “We have listened to every state’s perspective and have narrowed the discussion by identifying key elements and issues necessary for an agreement. We believe that a fair compromise with shared responsibility remains within reach.”
[…]
The dispute has largely hinged on whether states in the headwaters region would agree to mandatory cuts [ed. no one has the authority to order mandatory cuts in Colorado and likely in the entire upper basin] to their overall supply in especially dry years — a commitment they have so far rejected in part because they do not use their full allocation as the more developed Southwest does…
“As I talk with people throughout Southern Nevada, I hear their frustration that years of negotiations have yielded almost no headway in finding a path through these turbulent waters. As someone who has spent countless nights and weekends away from my family trying to craft a reasonable, mutually acceptable solution only to be confronted by the same tired rhetoric and entrenched positions,” [John] Entsminger said, “I share that frustration.”
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has released a February 24-month study showing inflow to Lake Powell declining by 1.5 million acre-feet since January as the federal agency highlights the worsening hydrologic conditions across the Colorado River Basin.
The study of the most probable forecast for the Colorado River under current conditions was released on Friday, just as the seven compact states remained at a stalemate and failed to meet a Feb. 14 deadline for agreement on how to reduce their own usage of water to save the river.
U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced on Saturday, Feb. 14, that the federal government is moving forward with finalizing operating guidelines for the Colorado River reservoirs by Oct. 1. His announcement adds pressure to Colorado and the other compact states to find compromise or face guidelines forced onto them by the federal government.
“While the seven Basin States have not reached full consensus on an operating framework, the Department cannot delay action,” the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said in its announcement that the federal government was moving forward.
Colorado River Basin. Credit: USGS
The lack of agreement among the compact states and the idea of federal intervention raises the prospect of litigation that would be drawn out and ultimately end with the U.S. Supreme Court. The current Rio Grande Compact dispute between Texas and New Mexico that has taken 12 years to reach a proposed settlement, now filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, gives an indication to the slow-evolving nature of U.S. water law.
“I am disappointed that the seven Basin States could not reach a consensus agreement on the future management of the Colorado River by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Feb. 14 deadline,” said Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who added that Colorado is prepared for litigation to protect Colorado’s rights and interests.
“Colorado will continue to work with our fellow Upper Division States to provide comments on the federal government’s draft environmental impact statement, which sets forth a range of possible solutions. The Upper Division States will have to cut back their usage of water from the Colorado River — by 40 percent or more — in the face of an historic drought,” he said.
U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper said the low snowpack this winter is adding an exclamation point to the dire conditions of the Colorado River Basin. “If we don’t address this problem together — head-on and fast — our communities, farms, and economies will suffer,” Hickenlooper said.
“The best path forward is the one we take together. Litigation won’t solve the problem of this long-term aridification. No one knows for sure how the courts could decide and the math will only get worse.”
BLM’s February 24-month study shows a loss of 1.5 million acre-feet is equivalent to approximately 50 feet in elevation in Lake Powell.
“The basin’s poor hydrologic outlook highlights the necessity for collaboration as the Basin States, in collaboration with Reclamation, work on developing the next set of operating guidelines for the Colorado River system,” said Acting BLM Commissioner Scott Cameron. “Available tools will be utilized and coordination with partners will be essential this year to manage the reservoirs and protect infrastructure.”
The water year inflow is now estimated at just 52 percent of average, and as a result, the February 24-Month Study projects, for the first time, that Lake Powell could decline (based on most probable projections) to:
“The basin’s poor hydrologic outlook highlights the necessity for collaboration as the Basin States, in collaboration with Reclamation, work on developing the next set of operating guidelines for the Colorado River system,” said Acting BLM Commissioner Scott Cameron. “Available tools will be utilized and coordination with partners will be essential this year to manage the reservoirs and protect infrastructure.”
The water year inflow is now estimated at just 52 percent of average, and as a result, the February 24-Month Study projects, for the first time, that Lake Powell could decline (based on most probable projections) to:
3,490 ft – minimum power pool in December 2026; below this level Glen Canyon Dam’s ability to release water is reduced and it can no longer produce hydropower.
3,476 ft – in March 2027; the lowest elevation on record since filling further constraining the ability to release water from Glen Canyon Dam.
Colorado River managers estimate that around 4 million acre-feet of cuts are needed to bring the basin back into balance – an amount equal to more than a quarter of the Colorado River’s annual average flow.
“There needs to be unbelievably harsh, unprecedented cuts,” Brad Udall, a senior water and climate research scientist at the Colorado Water Center, told The Guardian media outlet.
“Mother Nature is not going to bail us out,” Udall said.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
Flows in the Colorado River are down 20 percent over the last century and precipitation has shrunk by about 7 percent with rising temperatures as aridification takes hold across the southwest.
“The chickens are coming home to roost,” Udall said. “Climate models have underestimated how much warming we are going to get, and humans are not stepping up.”
Jack Schmidt, director of the Center for Colorado River Studies at Utah State University, likened the negotiations among the seven compact states to the final scene in “Thelma and Louise.” “Seven people have their hands on the steering wheel driving toward the edge of a cliff — and no one is working the brakes,” he reportedly said.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
The Department of the Interior is moving forward with the Post-2026 NEPA process to finalize operating guidelines for Colorado River reservoirs by Oct. 1, 2026. While the seven Basin States have not reached full consensus on an operating framework, the Department cannot delay action. Meeting this deadline is essential to ensure certainty and stability for the Colorado River system beyond 2026.
“Negotiation efforts have been productive; we have listened to every state’s perspective and have narrowed the discussion by identifying key elements and issues necessary for an agreement. We believe that a fair compromise with shared responsibility remains within reach,” said Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. “I want to thank the governors of the seven Basin States for their constructive engagement and commitment to collaboration. We remain dedicated to working with them and their representatives to identify shared solutions and reduce litigation risk. Additionally, we will continue consultations with Tribal Nations and coordinate with Mexico to ensure we are prepared for Water Year 2027.”
Prolonged drought conditions over the past 25 years and the most recent forecast showing inflow to Lake Powell declining by 1.5 million acre-feet since January underscore the ongoing challenges. The inflow reduction could result in Lake Powell dropping to an extremely low level, threatening water delivery and power generation.
The Colorado River is managed and operated under compacts, federal laws, court decisions and decrees, contracts and guidelines known collectively as the “Law of the River.” This apportions the water and regulates the use and management of the river among the seven Basin States – Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming – and Mexico. The Colorado River Compact is the cornerstone of the “Law of the River.” The 1944 Treaty with Mexico governs the sharing of the Colorado River between the two nations.
The Colorado River is a vital resource as it provides economic stability and enhances the quality of life across the basin. The river:
provides water to approximately 40 million people for municipal use.
supports the generation of hydroelectric energy, producing more than 8 billion kilowatt-hours annually powering the needs of approximately 700,000 homes.
sustains 5.5 million acres of farmland and agricultural communities where a significant share of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the United States are grown.
serves as a vital resource for 30 Tribal Nations and two Mexican states.
supports seven National Wildlife Refuges, four National Recreation Areas, and 11 National Parks.
“Through collaboration among the Department and Reclamation, states, Tribal Nations, Mexico and other key partners, we can create more opportunities for innovation and develop stronger tools to address drought and growing water demands,” said Assistant Secretary – Water and Science Andrea Travnicek. “Working together ensures that we combine expertise and resources to build solutions that benefit everyone and secure the future of the Colorado River.”
To learn more about this initiative, please visit the Colorado River Post-2026 website.
I met John Leary in the parking lot of a Tractor Supply in Rangely Colorado. There was something about the vehicles in that lot that made me think it might not be the best place to park a Toyota Yaris with California plates, so I parked around the corner, then moved my video gear into the back of John’s white utility truck.
John is a Senior Restoration & GIS Project Manager at RiversEdge West, a non-profit organization that’s leading the White River Partnership – a coalition of public, private, and nonprofit entities that are working to conserve and to restore riparian ecosystems along the White River and its tributaries.1
John had volunteered to show me some of the restoration work he and his teams had been doing on the riverbanks west of Rangely. The river had officially been designed as being “over-appropriated” in 2025. When a river is classified as being over-appropriated, it means that the total amount of water legally promised to water rights holders exceeds the supply of water that’s available in the river system at some or all times of the year.2 The designation acts as a formal recognition of water scarcity, where the demand for water is higher than the supply, often exacerbated by drought, climate change, and increased development.
John and his teams were working to reduce the number of invasive tamarisk and Russian olive trees that had crowded the White River’s banks, at the expense of wildlife and native vegetation like willows and cottonwoods. One of the methods John and his teams used was the application of tamarisk beetles. Tamarisk beetles originated in Eurasia – specifically central Asia, China, Kazakhstan, Greece, Uzbekistan, and Tunisia, and were introduced to North America as a biological control agent for invasive tamarisks. The beetles defoliate tamarisk trees by feeding on their leaves and on new growth, until the trees either weaken or die altogether.3
Since their introduction tamarisk beetles have spread across the Western U.S., including Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and even parts of Arizona, and in some areas have resulted in an 80% mortalityrate for the invasive tamarisks.4 This removal method sounds better than what I witnessed in California’s Coachella Valley, where miles of tamarisk trees had been intentionally burned by the Southern Pacific Railroad – which planted the trees in the early 1900s to keep sand off their railroad tracks.5
John Leary showing young native cottonwoods that are growing in an area previously occupied by tamarisks. Video link.
John and I drove west along the river and then finally parked. We hiked to a spot where John showed me a stand of native cottonwoods had sprouted up after his team removed tamarisks which had previously occupied that area. During the interview I filmed with John he repeatedly credited RiversEdge West and their partners in the White River Partnership, which included the Bureau of Land Management, Canyon Country Discovery Center, Colorado Northwestern Community College, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, State of Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, Town of Meeker, Colorado,Town of Rangely, CO, Uintah County Utah, Utah Conservation Corps, Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, Utah State University, Western Colorado Conservation Corps, the White River Alliance, and most importantly many ranchers and private land owners who supported the restoration efforts being carried out on their own riverfront property.6
The operation of Lake Powell and Lake Mead in the February 2026 24-Month Study is pursuant to the December 2007 Record of Decision on Colorado River Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and the Coordinated Operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead (Interim Guidelines),1 the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for Near-term Colorado River Operations Record of Decision (2024 Interim Guidelines SEIS ROD),2 and reflects the 2026 Annual Operating Plan (AOP). Pursuant to the Interim Guidelines, the August 2025 24-Month Study projections of the January 1, 2026, system storage and reservoir water surface elevations set the operational tier for the coordinated operation of Lake Powell and Lake Mead during 2026.
The August 2025 24-Month Study projected the January 1, 2026, Lake Powell elevation to be less than 3,575 feet and at or above 3,525 feet and the Lake Mead elevation to be at or above 1,025 feet. Consistent with Section 6.C.1 of the Interim Guidelines, and Section 6.E of the 2024 Interim Guidelines SEIS ROD, the operational tier for Lake Powell in water year (WY) 2026 is the Mid-Elevation Release Tier and the water year release volume from Lake Powell is projected to be 7.48 million acre feet (maf). To protect a target elevation at Lake Powell of 3,525 feet, adjustments to Glen Canyon Dam monthly volume releases have been incorporated into the December 2025 24-Month Study and include an adjusted monthly
release volume pattern for Glen Canyon Dam that will hold back a total of 0.598 maf in Lake Powell from December 2025 through April 2026. 3 That same amount of water (0.598 maf) will be released later in the water year. Given the hydrologic variability of the Colorado River System, the actual WY 2026 operations, and being consistent with Section 6.E of the 2024 Interim Guidelines SEIS ROD, the projected release from Lake Powell in WY 2026 may be less than 7.48 maf. Consistent with Section 6.E of the 2024 Interim Guidelines SEIS ROD, Reclamation will consider all tools that are available during the interim period to avoid Lake Powell elevation declining below 3,500 feet. The August 2025 24-Month Study projected the January 1, 2026, Lake Mead elevation to be below 1,075 feet and above 1,050 feet. Consistent with Section 2.D.1 of the Interim Guidelines, a Shortage Condition consistent with Section 2.D.1.a will govern the operation of Lake Mead for calendar year (CY) 2026. In addition, Section III.B of Exhibit 1 to the Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) Agreement will also govern the operation of Lake Mead for CY 2026. Lower Basin projections for Lake Mead take into consideration additional conservation efforts under the LC Conservation Program.
Current runoff projections into Lake Powell are provided by the National Weather Service’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. The observed unregulated inflow into Lake Powell for the month of January was 0.265 maf or 79% of the 30-year average from 1991 to 2020. The February 2026 unregulated inflow forecast for Lake Powell is 0.260 maf or 71% of the 30-year average. The 2026 April through July unregulated inflow forecast for Lake Powell is 2.40 maf or 38% of average. The WY 2026 unregulated inflow forecast for Lake Powell is 5.02 maf or 52% of average.
Due to changing Lake Mead elevations, Hoover’s generator capacity is adjusted based on estimated effective capacity and plant availability. The estimated effective capacity is based on projected Lake Mead elevations. Unit capacity tests will be performed as the lake elevation changes. This study reflects these changes in the projections.
For questions on Upper Colorado River Basin (UCB) reservoir operations, please contact Alex Pivarnik, the UCB River Operations Group Supervisor at apivarnik@usbr.gov. For questions on Lower Colorado River Basin (LCB) reservoir operations, please contact Noe Santos, the LCB River Operations Manager at nsantos@usbr.gov.
Hoover, Davis, and Parker Dam historical gross energy figures come from Power, Operations, and Maintenance reports provided by the Lower Colorado Region’s Power Office,
Bureau of Reclamation, Boulder City, Nevada. Questions regarding these historical energy numbers can be directed to Rebecca Rogers (rrogers@usbr.gov) or Kyra Cubi(kcubi@usbr.gov).
1 For modeling purposes, simulated years beyond 2026 assume a continuation of the 2007 Interim Guidelines including the 2024 Supplement to the 2007 Interim Guidelines (no additional SEIS conservation is assumed to occur after 2026), the 2019 Colorado River Basin Drought Contingency Plans, and Minute 323 including the Binational Water Scarcity Contingency Plan. With the exception of certain provisions related to Intentionally Created Surplus recovery and Upper Basin demand management, operations under these agreements are in effect through 2026. Reclamation initiated the process to develop operations for post-2026 in June 2023, and the modeling assumptions described here are subject to change.
The controversy surrounding Glen Canyon Dam’s River Outlet Works (ROW) centers on a critical design vulnerability: the dam may soon be unable to reliably release water if Lake Powell drops below the minimum power pool (3,490 feet). 1
Aerial photo of the Glen Canyon Dam near Page, Arizona. Photo by Alexander Heilner/The Water Desk, with aerial support by LightHawk.
While the dam usually releases water through high-elevation penstocks to generate hydropower, the ROW—four 8-foot-wide steel pipes—is theonly way to move water once levels drop too low for the turbines. Recent inspections by the Bureau of Reclamation revealed significant damage to these pipes, including cavitation—a process where high-velocity water creates vapor bubbles that implode, eroding the steel.2
Reliability Gap: The ROW was designed for temporary use (e.g., flood control), not for the continuous, long-term operation that a “dead pool” scenario would require. A March 2024 memo from the Bureau of Reclamation warned that they should not be relied upon as the sole means of sustained water delivery.3
Legal & Economic Threat: If the ROW fails or its capacity is restricted to prevent further damage, the Upper Basin states may be unable to meet their legal obligation to deliver water to 30 million people in the Lower Basin (Arizona, Nevada, California).4
Safety Buffer: Due to the damage, the Bureau recently determined they can only safely operate the ROW at levels at least 24 feet above dead pool (3,370 feet), effectively raising the “failure point” of the dam’s plumbing.5
Proposed Fixes: Environmental groups, such as the Utah Rivers Council, advocate for drilling new, lower-level bypass tunnels around the dam to ensure water can flow even at riverbed levels. However, these modifications are costly and could take over a decade to implement.6
Meadows in north Routt County, Colorado, were bare in spots on Feb. 9 after a slow start to this winter’s snowpack. Scott Franz/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Scott Franz):
February 13, 2026
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
Jay Fetcher and other ranchers in northwest Colorado measure snowpack each winter using their barbed wire stock fences.
A healthy level is called a three wire winter, when the snow piles up past the third wire above the ground. But on Feb. 9, the region was experiencing a zero wire winter.
“We just have no snow, and I have never seen it, in my 75 years here, I have never seen this,” Fetcher said Monday as he navigated patches of mud on his ranch in the Elk River valley north of Steamboat Springs.
Jay Fetcher poses on his ranch in northwest Colorado on Feb. 9. Low snowpack is adding pressure to negotiations on how to conserve the dwindling Colorado River. Scott Franz/KUNC
Many of the hills and meadows surrounding his ranch were brown and bare. The thermostat on Fetcher’s truck read 50 degrees, and the last patch of snow was melting fast off the roof of a barn.
This year, Fetcher’s ranch is on the frontlines of record-low snowpack across the West that is adding a sense of urgency among seven states to finalize a plan for how to conserve the dwindling Colorado River.
The snow in the nearby Zirkel wilderness melts into the Elk River and irrigates Fetcher’s fields before the water eventually joins the Colorado River and flows to millions of people downstream.
But things have been changing near Fetcher’s ranch over the past decade, and it could have implications for states competing for the water supply.
Since 1951, the Fetchers have tracked how long the snow stays on their meadows by marking the date in a little red journal. The data shows the snow is melting sooner in the valley.
“In the past 10 years, the snow leaving the meadow has moved up by 12 days,” he said. “This winter is a real indication of climate change, with bare meadows in the middle of February. I mean, what date am I going to write down for (when) snow left the meadow this year? Did it ever come?”
Jay Fetcher walks through a barn door on his ranch in Routt County, Colorado. Scott Franz/KUNC
The dwindling water supply in the Colorado River basin is driving intense negotiations among the seven states over how to share it in the future. Some forecasts predict water levels at Lake Powell could get so low this year that its dam would stop producing electricity. States have until Saturday to come to an agreement and the pressure has been building.
If they don’t, they might end up fighting each other in the Supreme Court.
Downstream states, including California and Arizona, say Colorado and states in the upper basin should pitch in with mandatory water restrictions during dry years.
But leaders in the Rocky Mountains are digging in.
They say ranchers and cities are already enacting conservation plans, and more cuts should not be forced on them.
“If we don’t choose how to live within the river’s limits, the river will choose it for us, and she will not be gentle,” Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s top river negotiator, said in a speech to a water conference in January. “Operations (of the river’s reservoirs) must be supply based, not demand based, not entitlement justified, and not built on a hope that the next big year will save us.”
Negotiators in the lower basin are calling for compromise. J.B. Hamby is California’s water negotiator.
“It’s going to take everyone chipping in and making the necessary (water) reductions to balance the supply with the demand we have moving forward,” he said during a speech last month.
The Yampa River in downtown Steamboat Springs was mostly ice free on Feb. 9 as temperatures rose above 50 degrees. Scott Franz/KUNC
Sitting on a patio on his ranch in northwest Colorado, Fetcher said Monday he’s not confident the lower and upper basins will resolve their differences anytime soon.
He said he’s willing to donate some water he doesn’t use each year downstream to California, but under current regulations, he would risk losing his water rights under a ‘use it or lose it’ system.
“I know that we will be able to irrigate these meadows just fine, because of our water rights, because of where we are, because of the ranch being on the Elk River. So from a personal standpoint, I’m okay with it,” he said. “The challenging question is, what happens with the lower basin? They’re just going to have to think about how to get by with less water and not have so many golf courses out there.”
The deadline for the seven states to agree on a long-term plan for how to conserve the Colorado River is Saturday.
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map February 12, 2026.
The Lower 48 states and Alaska only saw degradations this week. There was a strong east-to-west temperature gradient again this week, with below-normal temperatures across much of the East and above-normal temperatures across the West. Another week of localized precipitation that missed large portions of the country led to expanding precipitation deficits. Degradations were also scattered across the West, from the Pacific Northwest into the northern and central Rockies, including portions of Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and western Colorado. Although some mountain snow fell, critically low snowpack with snow-water equivalent levels below the 15th percentile continues to dominate much of the region and support ongoing drought expansion. Across the High Plains and into the western Midwest, one-class degradations followed another mostly dry week. In the Northeast, despite colder-than-normal temperatures, a continued lack of meaningful precipitation contributed to worsening conditions in parts of Pennsylvania and southern New England. Degradations were also seeing across the South, from the eastern southern Plains of Oklahoma and Texas eastward into the Lower Mississippi Valley and the western Carolinas. Despite scattered precipitation in some locations, short- to mid-term precipitation deficits continue to grow, with drying soils and low streamflows supporting intensification. In southern Georgia and Florida, fire danger continues to rise, with parts of Florida reporting Keetch-Byram Drought Index values between 500 and 700.
In Hawaii, strong trade winds brought heavy precipitation and wind to the windward slopes of Molokai, Maui and the Big Island, where 4 to 10 inches of rain fell at lower elevations and snow at higher elevations, supporting one-class improvements in those areas…
The High Plains saw little to no meaningful precipitation this week, with most of the region receiving less than 25 percent of normal and many locations at or below 5 percent of normal precipitation. Any snowfall was light and offered minimal liquid-equivalent benefit. In eastern Wyoming and eastern Colorado, precipitation deficits continue to deepen with soil moisture percentiles declining, and recent above-normal temperatures led to drying where snow cover is limited. This led to expansion of moderate (D1) and severe drought (D2) across parts of eastern Wyoming and Colorado into the southwest South Dakota, the Nebraska Panhandle and the western Nebraska Sandhills. Similarly, growing short- to medium-term precipitation deficits, below-normal soil moisture percentiles and elevated evaporative demand led to the introduction of extreme drought (D3) to Nebraska’s Panhandle. Eastern Nebraska also saw the expansion of abnormal dryness (D0) as the lack of precipitation has led to drying conditions. Across Kansas, degradations occurred primarily in the northwest, south and along the Missouri border in eastern Kansas following another dry week which, like the rest of the region, added to the growing precipitation deficits and drying soil moisture…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending February 10, 2026.
Precipitation across the West this week was light and uneven. Most low-elevation areas in California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah and western Colorado received little to no measurable liquid precipitation, with seven-day totals generally below 0.25 to 0.50 inches. Mountain snow did fall in portions of the northern Rockies and Pacific Northwest, but accumulations were locally light and patchy. Snowpack and Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) percentiles remain well below normal at many SNOTEL sites: much of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and western Colorado show SWE values in the lowest 15th percentile, with numerous locations in the single digits for this time of year.
Temperatures were above normal across broad areas of the interior West, especially in the Great Basin, central and eastern Wyoming, and northern Colorado, where daytime highs ran 5 to 15 degrees above average at times. These warmer temperatures limited snow accumulation in some basins and contributed to surface drying where snow cover was sparse or absent.
Across the Pacific Northwest, isolated precipitation helped maintain existing conditions in parts of western Washington, Oregon and northern California. However, low SWE percentiles and expanding short- to mid-term precipitation deficits led to the expansion of abnormal dryness (D0) and localized moderate drought (D1) in Washington. Despite seeing precipitation this week, areas of Montana still saw degradations where short- to mid-term precipitation deficits, low soil moisture percentiles and poor snowpack continue to be of concern. Across Utah, Nevada and western Colorado, persistent 2 to 4 month precipitation deficits combined with declining soil moisture and very low SWE percentiles (snow drought) led to further degradations. Many SNOTEL sites in the central Rockies and Great Basin continue to report levels below the 10th percentile for snowpack, with Colorado experiencing its worst snowpack-to-date on record, according to Denver Water and 9NEWS…
Drought conditions across the South continued to deteriorate this week, as much of the region received little to no meaningful precipitation. Most areas recorded below 50 percent of normal rainfall, with many locations under 25 percent of normal. Portions of middle and northeastern Tennessee received 0.5 to 1 inch of precipitation, but amounts were insufficient to offset ongoing 30- to 90-day precipitation deficits. Degradations occurred across the southern Plains into the Lower Mississippi Valley as short- to mid-term precipitation deficits continue to grow across Louisiana, Arkansas and portions of Texas and Oklahoma, with many areas 2 to 6 inches below normal over the past few months. Soil moisture percentiles remain below normal across much of the region and are particularly low in central Louisiana, southern Arkansas and parts of western Oklahoma and South Texas. Streamflows in several basins continue to run below seasonal averages, with some gauges in low percentiles following weeks of limited recharge.
In Deep South Texas, long-term dryness continues to intensify. From August 14, 2025, through February 10, 2026, Rio Grande City ranks as the fifth warmest and third driest on record dating back to 1928, while McCook ranks as the second warmest and sixth driest since 1942 according to NWS and NOAA. A nearby Texas Mesonet site near Hebbronville recorded just 3.81 inches over the past 180 days, and another Mesonet site along the Starr and Jim Hogg County line recorded 11.5 inches, with only 0.33 inches falling during December and January combined. Persistent six-month precipitation deficits and continued warmth reinforced long-term hydrologic stress across the lower Rio Grande Valley…
Looking Ahead
Over the next five to seven days (Feb. 12–17), a widespread and active precipitation pattern is forecast across much of the western and southern U.S. The heaviest totals are expected from eastern Texas into Arkansas, where widespread amounts of 3 to 5 inches are forecast, with locally higher totals possible. Additional areas of 1 to 3 inches are expected across much of the lower Mississippi Valley, central Gulf Coast, and into portions of the Southeast. Farther west, widespread precipitation is forecast across California, the Great Basin, and into the central and northern Rockies, where liquid-equivalent totals of 1 to 3 inches are expected, with locally higher amounts in favored terrain. Lighter but still meaningful precipitation is forecast across portions of the Midwest and into parts of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. In contrast, much of the northern Plains is expected to remain relatively dry during this period.
The Climate Prediction Center’s 6-10 day temperature outlook (Feb. 17–21) favors above-normal temperatures across much of the central and eastern U.S., including the Plains, Midwest, Ohio Valley and Southeast. The strongest probabilities for above-normal temperatures are centered over the central Plains and lower Mississippi Valley. In contrast, below-normal temperatures are favored across much of the West Coast and portions of the Great Basin. Alaska favors below-normal temperatures across much of the mainland, while Hawaii is favored to see above-normal temperatures.
The CPC 6-10 day precipitation outlook (Feb. 17–21) favors above-normal precipitation across much of the western United States, including California, the Great Basin, and the northern and central Rockies. Above-normal precipitation is also favored across parts of the northern Plains and Upper Midwest. In contrast, below-normal precipitation is favored across the southern tier from southern Texas eastward across the Gulf Coast and into Florida. Much of the central United States, including portions of the Tennessee and Ohio Valleys, is favored to see near-normal precipitation during this period.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending February 10, 2026.
Biologist David Inouye spent part of his Tuesday afternoon harvesting Jerusalem artichokes from his garden in the 1,400-person town of Paonia in western Colorado.
“It’s been so warm and dry here that my garden’s ready to plant,” Inouye said. “I was actually thinking about maybe planting some spinach or peas this week.”
Even with current snowstorms, Colorado’s snowpack this year is, frankly, horrible. The entire state has been in a snow drought with a record-low snowpack. The signs are everywhere: Skiers see it when they hit the slopes. Water providers keep an eye on their reservoir levels and talk about summer watering restrictions. Wildland fire experts gauge fire risk this summer and push people to remove flammable brush from their properties.
Two weeks ago, Inouye skied up to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory near Gothic, where he and other scientists have been conducting research for over 50 years, and saw exposed dirt patches at 9,500 feet of elevation — areas that would normally be buried by snow. Bees, wildflowers, marmots and more could all be affected by this season’s thin, weak snowpack.
Snow showers in this week’s forecast offer a dose of relief, but they won’t be enough to get the state out of a tough, dry year. The Colorado Sun sought out experts from around the state to see what’s going on — and what we need to watch for looking ahead.
Colorado’s winter has been unseasonably warm with so few snowstorms that the mountain snowpack is the lowest it’s been since 1987.
Climatologists are scouring data from high-elevation federal weather stations, called SNOTEL stations, to gauge what this year’s water supply is going to look like. Stations were built over the years until, by 1987, there were enough to provide a comprehensive look at statewide snowpack.
As a headwaters state, snowmelt from Colorado’s mountains runs in all directions to provide water to communities in 19 downstream states before it reaches the Pacific Ocean and Gulf of Mexico.
This year is not quite as bad as two terrible winters in recent memory: 1976-77 and 1980-81. But some smaller watersheds in the state have been dry enough to break even those records, according to state climatologists at Colorado State University’s Colorado Climate Center who analyzed hand-gathered measurements that date back to 1940.
What has really set this water year apart is how warm it’s been, according to the climate center. Colorado just had the third warmest November and the warmest December in over 130 years of records.
Colorado is over 60% of the way through its snow season, which means there’s still some time to avoid a historically bad, record-breaking year statewide. But the chance of getting a normal snowpack becomes slimmer every day, said Peter Goble, assistant state climatologist at the climate center.
The winter storms this week will help, he said. But even if Colorado had a repeat of 2019 — an above-average snow year — from February through April, its snowpack would still be just below normal.
“We have not yet had a year when we were running really low at this point and then just had a magical second half of the snow season and got all the way back,” Goble said.
Visitation is down at ski resorts
The poor snow year has already taken a toll on ski resorts and local economies.
Vail Resorts last month told investors that visitation to its 37 North American ski areas was down 20% through Jan. 4 compared with the previous season. Company CEO Rob Katz pointed to “one of the worst early-season snowfalls in the Western U.S. in over 30 years” — with snowfall at the company’s Rocky Mountain ski areas in Colorado and Utah down 60% from 30-year averages — as the main reason behind the decline.
The company’s Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Crested Butte Mountain Resort, Keystone and Vail ski areas account for more than a quarter of resort visitation in Colorado, the most trafficked ski state in the country. Vail Resorts is among several resort operators across the state that are cutting hours for workers as visitation ebbs and the lack of snow limits open terrain.
Colorado Ski Country has indicated its 20 members are seeing visitation declines in the “sizable double digits.”
Sales tax reports and end-of-season visitor counts are not due for a few months but several mountain communities are reporting lodging occupancy declines for the season around 10% as the snow-starved season limps further into February.
Meanwhile, the historic drought across the West has led to resort closures. In Oregon, Hoodoo, Mount Ashland and Mount Hood Skibowl have suspended operations as they wait for snow and Willamette Pass ski area is closed for two days midweek.
The thin snowpack left Colorado’s backcountry slopes with low avalanche danger in the middle of the winter, and that’s unusual, Ethan Greene, director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, said.
Since Nov. 1, CAIC has counted 31 people caught in avalanchesresulting in three injuries and no fatalities. That compares to 28 people caught in avalanches through mid-February in the 2024-25 season, resulting in three injuries and zero deaths. In the same span of the 2023-24 winter, CAIC tallied 47 people caught in avalanches, with three injuries and two deaths.
For winter sports enthusiasts, more dry days won’t be a great outcome, Greene said. More storms increase avalanche danger, but they also improve riding conditions.
This week’s winter storms bumped the danger level in northern Colorado to moderate and considerable levels Wednesday, up from a low danger rating Tuesday, based on the center’s avalanche danger map.
“We have a very thin and very weak snowpack,” Greene said. “It’s not posing a lot of danger right now, but if we go into a really active weather pattern that could change pretty substantially.”
City water also increasingly in doubt
Near-term droughts are a golden opportunity for Colorado water agencies to tap their long-standing signs declaring the need for more reservoir storage.
The water provider’s reservoirs are at 60% of capacity, which is lower than the city wants to see for this time of year, particularly with a record-low snowpack, Aurora Water spokesperson Shonnie Cline said. The region would have to get all of its normal snowfall — plus another 50% — over the next two months to get back to average.
The city council will soon decide whether it will declare deeper drought restrictions for this summer, she said. Restrictions aren’t out of the question for another big Front Range water provider, Denver Water, which serves 1.5 million people in Denver and surrounding suburbs.
Denver Water draws 90% of its water supply from the mountain snowpack in the Colorado River and South Platte basins. The snowpack near its water diversion tunnels and pipelines in these basins was 55% and 42% respectively as of Monday.
Northern Water, which serves community water agencies and ditches for 1.1 million people and 615,000 acres, said reservoir storage levels for its Colorado-Big Thompson Project are higher than in previous looming snowpack droughts.
That project “was built for years just like this one — where a low water supply threatened the ability of the farms and cities in our region to produce the economic benefits expected,” Northern Water spokesperson Jeff Stahla said. “What that means is that we have enough water in storage right now to ensure crops get out of the ground and cities can produce the materials needed for this upcoming high-demand season.”
Northern Water has also been in talks for months with members who had bought into a $2.7 billion, two-reservoir and pipeline plan to add storage along the Poudre and South Platte rivers. Some communities have signaled they will drop out because of the massive project’s rising costs, while Northern Water has pointed to communities that stayed in because they need supply for future growth and stability.
The dozen-plus community water agencies receiving Northern Water this year, though, will have to consider drought savings measures.
“We anticipate that communities within our boundaries will likely put in place policies to ensure we don’t waste any water and can ensure that we use the stored water for as long as possible,” Stahla said.
On Thursday, Northern Water’s board will hear a proposal to tap into an additional pool of water, called the administrative pool, that wasn’t used last year. The board will have to consider the possibility that this year’s drought might last longer than one season as it considers how much to draw from reserves, Stahla said.
A deep drought from 2000 to 2002 cut into their reservoir storage and supplies, depleting it so much that it took seven years to recover, he said.
“We recognize that we should be thinking about many variables as we look to release water for 2026,” Stahla said.
It could get too cold for the pikas
The low snowpack could have impacts on critters in the high country.
“Pikas depend on snowpack to insulate them from cold winter temperatures at high elevations, so the low snowpack could potentially make it harder for them to survive the winter,” said Megan Mueller, a conservation biologist with nonprofit Rocky Mountain Wild.
Through the Colorado Pika Project, a partnership between the nonprofit and the Denver Zoo, community scientists collect data in Colorado’s mountains in the summer to help scientists better understand the pika population and how it is being impacted by climate change.
Because the surveys take place in the summer, Mueller said it’s not yet clear what consequences this year’s dry weather will have on pikas. But existing research shows pika populations have gone extinct at sites where winter snowpack was insufficient for insulating them from the extreme cold.
Volunteers seeking to help scientists better understand the impact of this year’s snowpack on Colorado’s pikas can sign up online to join the Pika Patrol.
Ground squirrels, marmots, chipmunks, bears and other mountain mammals might have to use more energy to stay warm in their habitats without that snowy insulation. Burning energy faster could mean some will starve or emerge from hibernation earlier, according to Inouye with the Rocky Mountain Biological Center.
And just like mammals, insects and plants struggle in warm, dry winters.
Colorado has about 1,000 species of native bees, many of which spend winter underground and depend on the snowpack’s insulation.
Inouye has been watching how wildflowers, like aspen sunflowers and larkspurs, bloom in different conditions since 1973. Flowers start to bloom as soon as snow melts. With a thin snowpack, that melt could happen in mid-April, especially on sunnier, south-facing slopes. Wildflowers will start to bloom early and could be stunted by hard freezes that can typically appear through early June.
An early, sparse bloom affects pollen resources, which are key for bumblebees and migrating hummingbirds as they nurture larval bees or lay eggs, Inouye said.
“It’ll certainly be a very early season for the blooming of the wildflowers,” he added. “That’s typically associated with lower numbers of flowers.”
Fire managers fear early start to fire season, severe wildfires
This year’s low snowpack has wildfire managers fearing an early start to fire season and severe fires as the temperatures rise, especially along the Front Range.
“We haven’t seen anything quite like this in 30 years,” the state fire division’s planning section Chief Rocco Snart said.
The lack of snowpack this year reminds Snart of the conditions that led to the “horrific fire seasons” in 2000, 2002 and 2012.
“They were in the same realm as where we’re at today. But now we’re worse than those,” he said.
n those years, more than a dozen notable wildfires ignited amid extremely dry conditions. Hundreds of thousands of acres burned across the state and hundreds of homes were destroyed. In 2000, two human-caused fires destroyed 80 homes on the Front Range, while another fire sparked by lightning scorched 23,607 in Mesa Verde National Park, according to the National Weather Service.
In 2002, six massive fires sparked across the state, including the arson-caused Hayman fire that charred more than 137,000 acres across five Front Range counties and became the largest wildfire in Colorado history at the time. Five firefighters died and more than 600 structures were destroyed.
Waldo Canyon Fire
And in 2012, six massive wildfires rapidly spread amid extreme drought. Among them was the Waldo Canyon fire, which scorched 18,000 acres near Colorado Springs and destroyed 346 structures. Two people died.
If Colorado doesn’t start to see more precipitation soon, Snart said he fears wildfires will begin igniting much earlier than previous years, in March or April, and be fueled by winds. Vegetation will be dry as no new growth will have sprouted by then.
Snart sees wildfire risk along the Front Range as “especially problematic” because it picks up down-sloping winds from the mountains which are a “prime driver” of early season fires.
Fire risk is also very high along parched lower elevations of the Western Slope, he said.
Residents can take advantage of the warmer weather and start mitigating areas around their homes and being cautious of any activity that could cause sparks, especially on windy days, Snart said.
Jared Gardner apologizes for the interrupting beeps from his tractor’s GPS system as he makes his way across the family’s 3,500-acre farm near Rocky Ford. But he explains that it’s a different technology — the data on his smartphone — that grabs his attention multiple times each day as he considers the fate of the fields where he cultivates alfalfa, corn, sorghum and a mix of watermelons, cantaloupes and pumpkins.
Snowpack numbers, harvested from SNOTEL sites, influence planting in this agricultural corridor of the Lower Arkansas Valley. Snowpack determines runoff, which determines the flows of the Arkansas River, which determines what to grow and what to avoid.
When Gardner Farms plots out a two-year plan for crop rotation, it begins with a best-case scenario of conditions, untethered to limitations of drought. Closer to planting time, lower water estimates may steer operations to a Plan B, which might mean trimming back acreage for the thirstiest crops.
“My brother and I are probably on Plan C or D already, looking at this snowpack,” Gardner said. “It would take a small miracle to turn this thing around in a fashion that you’d say I have an ample supply of water. So for us, the first thing I do is pull corn back, to grow something with the yields that you need to break even in this marketplace. There’s not a lot of wiggle room for failure.”
A little more than an hour east on U.S. 50 near Lamar, Dale Mauch pays less attention to the snowpack numbers than the long-range weather forecasts, which he checks two or three times a day to gauge the fortunes of his 4,000 acres of hay, corn, wheat, oats and sorghum.
“The transition is supposed to be coming, but it may not be here till May, which could be too late for this year’s snowpack,” Mauch said, noting that his planting plans remain uncertain amid some forecasts that predict up to four feet of snow over the next few weeks.
Colorado Drought Monitor February 10, 2026.
“The silver lining for us down here by Lamar is we’ve had some storms with pretty good moisture,” he added. “So as far as being dry, we’re not in that bad of shape. We’re in better shape than the mountains right now.”
Overall, experts say the outlook for farmers — and ranchers, whose livestock rely on the same snowpack — leans away from optimism.
“It’s pretty grim,” said Kristen Boysen, managing director of the state Agriculture Department’s Office of Drought and Climate Resilience. “Producers are definitely bracing for the worst, but I don’t think anyone has changed their plans yet.”
Final decisions on what crops to plant, the size of cattle herds based on available water, and where to find extra grazing pastures or hay supplies all need to be made at most farms and ranches within a month, Boysen said. Even if agriculture sees snow over the mountains in the next few weeks, she added, the growing season may already be compromised.
“Across the state, we’ve seen so little moisture, so the soil is really dry,” Boysen said. “So any runoff we get from the mountains will just get sucked up so fast by the soil. And I think peak runoff will be very early. I think they’re crossing their fingers that it rains on their farm.”
Back in Rocky Ford, Gardner remains hopeful that a cold front forecast for the coming days might generate moisture to fulfill a farmer’s innate optimism. But even a foot or so of snow in the mountains probably won’t translate, in the long run, to much relief.
“Unless we just get an epic blizzard in the mountains, that sort of snow is kind of a Band-Aid for a bullet hole right now,” Gardner said. “And Colorado knows that. I think everyone in Colorado understands what a lack of snowpack means to the state, whether you ski on it, or irrigate with it, or just want to drink it.”
Colorado Sun reporters Olivia Prentzel, Michael Booth, Kevin Simpson and Jason Blevins also contributed to this report.
Synopsis: A transition from La Niña to ENSO-neutral is expected in February-April 2026(60% chance), with ENSO-neutral likely persisting through the Northern Hemispheresummer (56% chance in June-August 2026).
La Niña continued in January 2026, with below-average sea surface temperatures (SSTs) observed in the east-central equatorial Pacific Ocean. The latest weekly Niño-3.4 index value was -0.9°C, with the westernmost (Niño-4) and easternmost (Niño-1+2) indices at -0.4°C and 0.0°C, respectively. The equatorial subsurface temperature index (average from 180°-100°W) significantly increased, reflecting the strengthening and expansion of above-average subsurface temperatures across the Pacific Ocean. Atmospheric anomalies weakened due to subseasonal variability, but still reflected aspects of La Niña. Low-level westerly wind anomalies were present over the western equatorial Pacific, and upper-level westerly wind anomalies continued across the east-central equatorial Pacific. Suppressed convection was weakly evident near the Date Line and over the equatorial Maritime Continent, with enhanced convection located off the equator. The traditional and equatorial Southern Oscillation indices were positive. Collectively, the coupled ocean-atmosphere system remained consistent with La Niña.
The North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME) average, including the NCEP CFSv2, favor the onset of ENSO-neutral in February-April 2026. The team consensus also reflects this outcome, with ENSO-neutral persisting through the Northern Hemisphere summer 2026. For the late summer and beyond, there is a 50-60% chance of El Niño forming, though model uncertainty remains considerable and forecasts made this time of year tend to have lower accuracy. In summary, a transition from La Niña to ENSO-neutral is expected in February-April 2026 (60% chance), with ENSO-neutral likely persisting through the Northern Hemisphere summer (56% chance in June-August 2026.
Mountain snowmelt is the lifeblood of the Great Salt Lake, providing the vast majority of its fresh water. On average the mountains around the lake contribute approximately 1.9 to 2.1 million acre-feet of surface runoff annually.1 However on February first of this year – with Utah’s snowpack in near record-poor condition, Utah’s Natural Resources Conservation Service released a report that forecast a reduction in snowmelt that ranges from 21% to 77% of average.2
This (potentially) dramatic drop in snowmelt forces our attention to the Great Salt Lake’s other major source of water, the Bear River, and there the news is equally alarming. The Bear River in Utah faces a variety of environmental threats primarily from human activities like agriculture, water management, and development. These impact water quality, habitats, and flows into the Great Salt Lake. The following list of challenges the river faces are ranked in order of prevalence and severity, from reports like wetland studies and conservation plans.3
Clusters of microbialites, potentially thousands of years old, are endangered by The Great Salt Lake’s declining water levels and the water’s rising salinity. Video by Robert Marcos.
Water Diversions: Proposed and existing diversions, such as the Bear River Development project, threaten to reduce flows by up to 220,000 acre-feet annually, lowering Great Salt Lake levels by 8.5-14 inches and exposing lakebed dust with toxins like arsenic. This exacerbates drought effects and harms migratory birds reliant on Bear River Bay wetlands.4
Agricultural Runoff: Runoff from intensive farming affects 83% of wetlands, delivering excess nutrients, sediments, and pollutants that cause eutrophication, algal blooms, and oxygen depletion. The Bear River is impaired throughout the study area due to these inputs, worsened by upstream sources in Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming.5
Hydrologic Alteration: Dams, irrigation, and impoundments alter flow timing and flooding, impacting nearly all wetlands and degrading riparian habitats. Reservoirs like Cutler divert spring runoff, leading to inconsistent river flows and wetland desiccation.6
Invasive Species: Non-native plants like Phragmites australis cover 11% of wetlands, outcompeting natives and reducing biodiversity, especially in disturbed mudflats. Agricultural species such as foxtail and clover invade via forage planting.7
Sediment and Pollution: Erosion from tributaries and livestock causes siltation, while point sources (69% of wetlands) and nanoparticles from boat paints add contaminants. Legacy issues like high alkalinity and industrial wastes persist.8
A photo of Glen Canyon Dam from 2022, when the dam’s intake points were 33 feet away from minimum power pool. The top of the grate-like penstocks can be seen in this photo. Luna Anna Archey / High Country News
Floyd Dominy, the commissioner of the federal Bureau of Reclamation in the 1960s, was largely responsible for the construction of Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River. In 1963, when the dam was completed, he could not have foreseen the climate situation we find ourselves in today, with declining snowpack, record-high temperatures and alarmingly low water levels in Lake Powell, year after year. But he and his engineers could have, and should have, foreseen that the way they designed the dam would leave little room to maneuver should a water-supply crisis ever impact the river and its watershed.
Indeed, a state of crisis has been building on the Colorado for decades, even as the parties that claim its water argue over how to divide its rapidly diminishing flows. Lately, things have entered a new and perilous phase. Last Nov. 11 was a long-awaited deadline: Either the states involved — California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming — would have to agree on a new management plan, or else the federal government would impose its own, something none of the parties would welcome. Meanwhile, the 30 tribes that also hold claims to the river have historically been and continue to be excluded from these negotiations.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
That deadline came and went, and instead of acting, the government punted, this time to Feb. 14. Nobody was surprised: Unmet deadlines and empty ultimatums have been business as usual on the river for years. Decades of falling reservoir levels and clear warnings from scientists about global warming and drought have prompted much hand-wringing and some temporary conservation measures, but little in the way of permanent change in how water is used in the Colorado River Basin.
The downstream face of Glen Canyon Dam, which forms Lake Powell, America’s second-largest water reservoir. Water is released from the reservoir through a hydropower generation system at the base of the dam. Photo by Brian Richter
For decades, the seven Basin states have used more water than the river delivers by drawing their entitlements from surpluses banked in reservoirs during the wet 1980s and ’90s, chiefly in Lake Mead and Lake Powell. Never mind that those entitlements were based on an over-estimate of river flows in 1922, when the Colorado River Compact was established, rendering the “paper” water of the entitlements essentially a fiction, not to mention a source of continual conflict. That savings account has now been drained: Mead and Powell are each below 30% full, and the trend is steadily downward. Global warming has only accelerated the decline: So far this century, the river’s flow has fallen 20% from its long-term annual averages, and scientists forecast more of the same as the climate continues to heat up.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
Meanwhile, the physical infrastructure that enables Colorado River water management is on the verge of its own real and potentially catastrophic crisis — and yet Reclamation has barely acknowledged this, with the exception of an oblique reference in an unposted technical memorandum from 2024. The falling reservoir levels reveal another, deeper set of problems inside Glen Canyon Dam, which holds back the Colorado and Lake Powell. The 710-foot-tall dam was designed for a Goldilocks world in which water levels would never be too high or too low, despite the well-known fact that the Colorado is by far the most variable river in North America, prone to prodigious floods and extended droughts. But the Bureau, bursting with Cold War confidence — or hubris — chose to downplay the threat. In the record-breaking El Niño winter of 1983, the Bureau almost lost the dam to overtopping, due to both its mismanagement and its design, because the dam lacks sufficient spillway capacity for big floods. Only sheets of plywood installed across its top and cooler temperatures that slowed the melting of that year’s snowpack saved Glen Canyon Dam.
The four 96-inch diameter steel pipes of the River Outlet Works. If the dam’s penstocks are closed, these pipes are the only remaining way to pass water through the dam, and are unsafe to use for extended intervals. Luna Anna Archey / High Country News
Gus Levy, Glen Canyon Dam’s plant facility manager, walks past hydropower turbines. In 2022, due to the low water level of Lake Powell, only five of the eight turbines operated on a daily basis, though all eight were kept in working order. Luna Anna Archey / High Country News
Today, the dam is threatened not by too much water but too little. In March 2023, the water level of Lake Powell dropped to within 30 feet of the minimum required for power generation, known as “minimum power pool.” At 3,490 feet above sea level, minimum power pool is 20 feet above the generators’ actual intakes, or penstocks, but the dam’s eight turbines must be shut down at minimum power pool to avoid cavitation — when air is sucked down like a whirlpool into the penstocks, forming explosive bubbles which can cause massive failure inside the dam.
Even more worrisome is what would happen next. At minimum power pool, the penstocks would have to be closed, and the only remaining way to pass water through the dam is the river outlet works, or ROWs: two intakes in the rear face of the dam leading to four 96-inch-diameter steel pipes with a combined maximum discharge capacity of 15,000 cubic feet per second. However, the ROWs, also known as bypass tubes, have a serious design flaw: They are unsafe to use for extended intervals, and start to erode when the reservoir is low.
In 2023, when the ROWs were used to conduct a high-flow release into the Grand Canyon at low-reservoir levels, there was, in fact, damaging cavitation, and the Bureau has warned that there would likely be more in the event of their extended use. In practice, safe releases downstream may only be a fraction of their claimed capacity — and if the tubes begin to experience cavitation, flows may need to be cut off entirely. Such a scenario would compromise the dam’s legal downstream delivery requirements, or, to put it bluntly, its ability to deliver enough water to the 25 million people downstream who rely on it — as well as the billions of dollars’ worth of agriculture involved. This means that Lake Powell — and with it, the entire Colorado River system — is perilously close to operational failure.
If reservoir levels drop to the ROWs’ elevation of 3,370 feet above sea level, Lake Powell would reach “dead pool,” where water would pass through the dam only when the river’s flow exceeded the amount of water lost to evaporation from the reservoir. No other intakes nor spillways exist below the ROWs. There is no “drain plug.” Yet there is more dam — 240 feet more before the bottom of the reservoir, effectively the old riverbed. This not-insignificant impoundment — about 1.7 million acre-feet of water — would be trapped, stagnant and heating in the sun, prone to algal blooms and deadly anoxia. The lake would rise and fall wildly, as much as 100 feet in a season, because of the martini-glass shape of Lake Powell’s vertical cross section.
Illustration from the report, <a href=”https://utahrivers.org/blog-post/2022/8/9/lenapost“>Antique Plumbing & Leadership Postponed</a> from the Utah Rivers Council, Glen Canyon Institute and the Great Basin Water Network. Courtesy of Utah Rivers Council
Insufficient or no flows through Glen Canyon Dam would be a disaster of unprecedented magnitude, affecting vast population centers and some of the biggest economies in the world, not to mention ecosystems that depend on the river all the way to the Gulf of California in Mexico. The Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada warned as much in a recent letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, saying that Reclamation’s failure to mention the dam’s plumbing problems in its current environmental impact statement for post-2026 operations is against federal law. The letter reads: “Addressing the infrastructure limitations may be the one long-term measure that would best achieve operation and management improvements to the Glen Canyon Dam.”
To date, however, the Bureau has made no formal response.
One thing is clear: Glen Canyon Dam will need to be modified to meet its legal and operational requirements. In the process, the health of the ecosystems in Glen Canyon, above the dam, and in Grand Canyon, below it, must be considered. The best way to avoid operational failure and the economic and ecological disasters that would follow is to re-engineer the dam to allow the river to run through it or around it at river level, transporting its natural sediment load into the Grand Canyon.
Sketches by Floyd Dominy show the way he’d end the Glen Canyon Dam. From the article “Floyd Dominy built the Glen Canyon Dam, then he sketched its end on a napkin” on the Salt Lake Tribune
As it happens, Floyd Dominy himself provided us with a simple and elegant plan for how to do it. In 1997, the former commissioner sketched on a cocktail napkin how new bypass tunnels could be drilled through the soft sandstone around the dam and outfitted with waterproof valves to control the flow of water and sediment. What it prescribes is treating the patient — the Colorado River, now on life support — with open-heart surgery, a full bypass. Dominy’s napkin, which he signed and gave to my colleague Richard Ingebretsen, the founder of Glen Canyon Institute, is effectively a blueprint for a healthier future for the Colorado River and the people and ecosystems that depend on it.
But the window for action to avoid dead pool is dauntingly narrow and closing fast, especially given the time that would likely be required for the government to study, design and implement a fix. The Trump administration’s gutting of federal agency expertise and capacity adds yet more urgency to the issue. Whatever may or may not get decided on Feb. 14, the feds and the basin states need to look beyond the water wars and start building a lasting, sustainable future on the Colorado River.
The seven states that take water from the Colorado River have a deadline of February 14 to come up with a river management plan that they can all agree on. And every day that passes it looks as if that deadline, not the first one they have faced, will also be missed. Valentines Day may not be one of shared love by all.
The Colorado River basin is experiencing the greatest drought and loss of flows in the past 1200 years and the various agreements crafted to deal with deepening drought, particularly the 2007 Interim Guidelines and subsequent Drought Contingency Plans, are set to expire at the end of this year.
The major sticking point is centered around how water diversions from the river will be cut, and there will be substantial cuts. Most of that burden will fall on the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada. They are the largest users of Colorado River water. Cuts for the four Upper Basin states; Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico are not considered in either the previous guideline and agreements nor in the recently released Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for Post-2026 Operational Guidelines and Strategies for Lake Powell and Lake Mead by the Bureau of Reclamation. The DEIS only looks at the river below the upper reaches of Lake Powell.
This has the Lower Basin up in arms. They are demanding mandatory, verifiable and enforceable cuts by the river diversions in the Upper Basin. The Upper Basin is refusing this demand, and Arizona in particular is threatening to unleash its historical use of litigation to try and get what it wants.
Underlying this, however, is a very fundamental misunderstanding of how water diversions work between the Lower and Upper Basins. I’m starting to think that misunderstanding is deliberate, primarily to mislead the public constituents within the Lower Basin states. [ed. emphasis mine]
Tom Buschatzke, director of Arizona’s Department of Water Resources, has said, “We need certainty there are reductions in upper basin usage because that is one of the two tools that we have… You can’t make it snow or rain. But you can reduce your demand”.
But in the Upper Basin that is not as easy as it sounds.
I have read that the true skill of a good negotiator is in being able to truly understand the other sides position. There are skilled and knowledgeable negotiators in the Lower basin, but I don’t think that they truly understand the Upper Basins position. They have been accustomed, some would say addicted, to the reliable delivery of stored water for all their needs since Hoover Dam was built and began releasing stored water some 90 years ago. Only until very recently, even in the face of an unrelenting drought, have they had to deal with shortages. For the Upper Basin shortage is an annual reality.
The Lower Basin takes water from the Colorado River mainly through a small handful of very large diversions such as the All American Canal, which provides water for Imperial and Coachella Valley agriculture, the Central Arizona Project (CAP) providing water for Pheonix, Tucson, Tribes, and Arizona agriculture and the California Aqueduct, which provides water for Los Angeles, San Diego and most Southern California cities. While distribution from these few large diversions to individual contract uses may be complicated by drought, reducing the intake at their diversion points isn’t.
That situation is very different in the Upper Basin. In Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico there are many thousands of small diversions taking water from the Colorado River, the Green River and their myriad headwater tributaries. There are a few large diversions in the Upper Basin, primarily for water taken out of the basin to Colorado’s East Slope cities and farms and to Utah’s Wasatch Front, but these diversions are still quite small compared to those in the Lower Basin.
The largest reservoirs in the Upper Basin are those built through the Colorado River Storage Act (CRSP, 1956), such as Flaming Gorge, Blue Mesa and Navajo. These reservoirs were not built to supply Upper Basin water needs, but to provide a “bank account” for Colorado River Compact compliance. In other words, for the benefit of the Lower Basin. Releases from these reservoirs are contemplated in the Post-2026 DEIS to maintain water elevations in Lake Powell that protect vital dam infrastructure and hydropower generation.
Lake Powell is also an Upper Basin reservoir in the CRSP Act of 1956. It was built entirely for Compact compliance and water deliveries to the Lower Basin. It has no water supply benefit to the Upper Basin other than as a Compact savings account.
A major wrinkle in any mandatory curtailments in Upper Basin diversions is simply in administrative logistics. It would be a complete nightmare for water administration and the State water engineers offices. And in Colorado it would be in the Water Courts as well.
A little legal background is needed here as well.
See Article 6.
All of the Colorado Basin states have Prior Appropriation as the bedrock doctrine for their water laws. California has a bit of a mix with Riparian law, but as far as the Colorado River diversions are concerned prior appropriation rules. Prior appropriation is the doctrine of “first in time, first in right” to divert the available water. Colorado was the first to codify prior appropriation in its state constitution, in 1876. Article 16, Section 6:
“The right to divert the unappropriated waters of any natural stream to beneficial uses shall never be denied. Priority of appropriation shall give the better right as between those using the water for the same purpose; but when the waters of any natural stream are not sufficient for the service of all those desiring the use of the same, those using the water for domestic purposes shall have the preference over those claiming for any other purpose, and those using the water for agricultural purposes shall have preference over those using the same for manufacturing purposes.“
In Colorado you don’t actually need a court decreed right to divert water to a beneficial use. Just a shovel and a ditch. However, you are still subject to prior appropriation and can be the first cut off if a call is placed on the stream. There are a lot of such small diversions without an adjudicated right. I used to water my lawn in Eagle that way.
The Colorado River Compact of 1922 was created to avoid prior appropriation between the states. The US Supreme Court had decided that when there is a dispute over water between States that held prior appropriation as their foundational water law, seniority applies across state lines. Southern California was starting to grow at a much more rapid pace than the other states, greatly alarming the headwater, Upper Basin states. The Compact was crafted so that water from the river could be allocated “equitably”, allowing each state to grow and develop its water at its own pace. The Compact became the foundation of what is now known as the Law of the River. Laws based on prior appropriation still govern water use and administration within each State.
Arizona and California began arguing and litigating almost immediately, with Arizona usually on the losing end. That changed in 1963 when the US Supreme Court handed down a decision that once and for all set the water allocations for the Lower Basin, based on the allocations created in the 1928 Boulder Canyon Project Act, which finally ratified the Compact and paved the way for Hoover Dam, Lake Mead and the All American Canal.
Then the seniority picture between states changed with the passage of the 1968 Colorado River Projects Act that authorized construction of Arizona’s long fought for dream of the Central Arizona Project. To get passage, Arizona had to subordinate its water rights to California, making it the junior and first to take cuts in times of drought.
Upper Colorado River Basin map via the Upper Colorado River Commission.
None of that extended into the Upper Basin, where the States had been getting along just fine, mostly, since the Compact was signed. These four states drafted their own Upper Colorado River Basin Compact in 1948, mainly so they could get more money from the Federal Government to build water storage and delivery projects. They did something novel, allocating each states share by a percentage of the rivers flow, not by set volumes of water as the 1922 Compact had done.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
Everything was fine so long as the major reservoirs of Lakes Mead and Powell were full. That has changed considerably since the onset of the current mega, or Millennial drought began in 2000. The two reservoirs have dropped to very low levels, levels never anticipated or planned for.
Here is the crux of the matter. The Lower Basin is demanding mandatory cuts from Upper Basin uses so that more water can flow downstream for their use. The 1922 Compact says clearly that the Upper Basin states “will not cause the river flow at Lee Ferry to be depleted below and aggregate of 75,000,000 acre feet for any period of ten consecutive years…”. The Lower Basin states argue that this constitutes an “obligation” to deliver that much water to them. The Upper Basin states say no, there is no delivery obligation. It is a non-depletion requirement, that through diversions and actual consumption the states can’t let those flows drop below 75 million acre feet (maf) in a ten year running average.
That has never been a problem, until now. The 1922 Compact and its non-depletion requirement is a priority right in itself. Any water right in the Upper Basin that was adjudicated, perfected by actual use and consumption, after 1922 is subject to curtailment for fulfilling the non-depletion requirement. Any and all rights perfected prior to November 1922 are exempt.
So far, as of 2026, the required flows over a ten year running average have not yet hit that non-depletion trigger of 75 maf running average over ten years. Not yet, but it could be getting close.
The Upper Basin states live by a “run of the river” system as there are no large storage units dedicated to their use as the Lower Basin has with Powell and Mead. There are many small reservoirs used for a single irrigation season, filled with the spring runoff and then empty by the end of the growing season. But they also are subject to how much water comes in the spring and downstream senior calls.
Every year, especially since this mega drought and increased aridification began, Upper Basin irrigators are curtailed each summer as the streams shrink and the small reservoirs are drained. Some years this curtailment includes water rights that are senior to the Compact as well.
The Upper basin, in short, is forced to live within its means, with what it has and no more than Mother Nature provides with the winter snowpack. As Tom Buschatzke said, “You can’t make it snow or rain. But you can reduce your demand”. The Upper Basin does exactly that every year, especially in years like this with a record low snowpack.
The mandatory, verifiable and enforceable cuts demanded by the Lower Basin would be more than difficult to achieve. And again, it would be an administrative and legal nightmare for those assigned the task on the thousands of relatively small, individual diversions that make up the Upper Basin’s water use from the Colorado River. There are those larger trans-basin diversions to the Colorado East Slope and cities, but even if they took substantial cuts, it would still be a pretty small amount of water. No where near the amounts that the Lower Basin has become accustomed to.
Right now the Upper Basin uses roughly half their Compact allocation, roughly around 4 maf a year, while the Lower Basin has historically used more than their full Compact allocation. To their credit, the Lower Basin has made substantial cuts, some voluntary and some enforced by agreements and obligations. California was forced to cut their water use by 800,000 acre-feet with the 2007 Interim Guidelines, back to their actual decreed limit, a cut some claim as an example of how much “sacrifice” they have made. They and Arizona have made additional cuts as well, now taking around 6 maf, from a historic high near 10 maf per year.
I agree that the Upper basin needs to work harder at conservation, and they have been trying hard over the last few years. They haven’t been hording water or ignoring the needs of the Lower Basin or those spelled out in the Compact and subsequent agreements as some in the Lower Basin claim. But “mandatory” cuts beyond those already happening each and every summer will require significant changes with state water law and administration. In Colorado’s case it could well require a change to Article 16, Section Six, of the state’s constitution which has held unaltered since 1876.
We live now in a very different world from the 1800’s and 1922 when the Compact was drafted, using highly optimistic flow calculations that they already knew were wrong. But the men who drafted it were boosters, as were their fathers, seeing the West as they wanted to, not as it really was. America’s westward expansion has always been driven by dreams of abundance, and for a while the river was able to provide that through massive engineering, a still small but growing population and some pretty wet years. Many still hold on to that misguided dream of abundance in an increasingly arid region.
That has all evaporated. All water users in the West, especially the Colorado River basin, expect certainty and reliability, as Tom Buschatzke declared. We’ve built an entire system, and an entire economy based on those principals. Certainty and reliability are now fading rapidly in the rear view mirror, if we dare to look. Many won’t. The Colorado River has made the desert bloom and let us build great cities. But its dwindling supply is placing all that in jeopardy. We need to adapt. The only certain and reliable future is one with less water, greater aridity and warmer and much drier climate.
Maybe our great civilization built on a desert river will go the way of the Hohokam who filled the valley Pheonix now inhabits with irrigation canals and a thriving population. Maybe. We can change that scenario if we adapt to the new reality. That will be both hard and painful. Parochial self-interest must be balanced with regional ties and interests, and that is never easy. Nor is it politically palatable. The Lower Basin is railing against the Upper Basin’s refusal to provide water it just doesn’t have. The Upper Basin is living within its means while honoring its commitments to the Compact as best it can.
The Bureau of Reclamation in its DEIS for Post-2026 river management introduced a new concept, at least new for Colorado River management. Decision making under Deep Uncertainty, or DMDU. Many, seemingly, aren’t familiar with that concept. Even the Bureau’s recommendations may not go far enough with that concept. They don’t seriously engage the reality that both Powell and Mead are headed for deadpool, meaning that the only water available from either reservoir will be what flows in. There will be no storage to rely on. None. That will have far more devastating impacts than what any of the alternatives contemplate. [ed. emphasis mine]
But when the well runs dry there isn’t much we can do. A few years ago the concept of stationarity in climate norms, basing predictions within the parameters of historical extremes, was declared dead. The ideas of certainty and reliability are now headed for the same graveyard.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Click the link to read the assessment on the NOAA website:
February 11, 2026
January Highlights:
The global surface temperature was the fifth-warmest January on record—the smallest temperature departure since 2023.
Snow cover extent was below average for North America and near average for Eurasia.
Sea ice extent was near record low for the Arctic and below average for Antarctica.
Global tropical cyclone activity was above normal with 11 named storms.
Map of global notable weather and climate anomalies and events in January 2026.
Temperature
January 2025 ranked as the fifth-warmest January in NOAA’s 177-year record, with a global surface temperature 2.02°F (1.12°C) higher than the 20th-century baseline. All 10 of the warmest Januarys on record have occurred since 2007, with the most recent five years (2022–26) among the top 10.
Land and Ocean Temperature Percentiles for January 2026. Red indicates warmer than average and blue indicates colder than average.
In January 2026, unusually high temperatures prevailed across much of the Earth’s surface. The most notable high temperature departures were observed across the Arctic, Greenland, the western U.S., Canada, Africa, southern and eastern Asia and parts of Australia, where temperature departures were at least 3.6°F (2.0°C) above average. Several regions across the globe experienced their warmest January on record, including parts of Greenland, Africa, Asia, the Atlantic and parts of the Pacific and Southern Oceans. Notably, Africa experienced its warmest January on record, while North America, South America and Oceania had a top 10 warm January.
In contrast, notable below-average temperatures were observed in Alaska, the eastern U.S., Europe, northern Asia and across parts of Antarctica and the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. However, no land or ocean areas experienced record-cold January temperatures.
Snow Cover
In January 2026, snow cover extent across North America and Greenland was 150,000 square miles below average, tying with 2002 for the 12th-smallest January extent on record. Meanwhile, Eurasia saw near-average coverage at 11.48 million square miles. Overall, Northern Hemisphere snow cover for January was slightly below average at 18.12 million square miles.
Regionally, snow deficits were most pronounced across the western half of the contiguous U.S. and central Asia extending into China. In contrast, above-average snow cover was observed in the south-central U.S. extending towards the Northeast, central and eastern Europe, Japan and parts of northern and northeastern China.
Sea Ice
Global sea ice extent was the fifth smallest for January in the historical record at 550,000 square miles below the 1991–2020 average. The Arctic sea ice extent was below average by 340,000 square miles, tying with 2025 as the second-smallest January extent in the 48-year record. The Antarctic sea ice extent for January was the 13th smallest at 210,000 square miles below average.
Map of the Antarctic (left) and the Arctic (right) sea ice extent in January 2026.
Tropical Cyclones
Global tropical cyclone activity in January was above normal, producing 11 named storms. Four of these reached tropical cyclone strength, and two intensified into major tropical cyclones. Most of the activity occurred in the Southern Hemisphere (South Indian, Australian and Southwest Pacific basins), with one named storm in the West Pacific. No storms formed in the North Atlantic, East Pacific or North Indian basins, which is typical during January.
Notably, Tropical Cyclone Fytia, in the Southern Indian basin, made landfall in northern Madagascar at the end of the month as a strong cyclone, bringing heavy rainfall and widespread flooding. The storm caused at least 12 deaths, displaced thousands and damaged or destroyed thousands of homes.
More than 8,500 daily heat records have been tied or broken in the West this winter. "I have not seen a winter like this," said NSIDC director Mark Serreze, who has been in Colorado almost 40 years. "This pattern that we're in is so darned persistent." https://t.co/nn3WylQ9uL
The Gold King Mine spill happened on August 5, 2015, when EPA contractors accidentally released approximately 3 million gallons of contaminated wastewater into Cement Creek – a tributary of the Animas River in Colorado. The plume, containing heavy metals, flowed into the Animas and San Juan rivers. 1 The USGS – in cooperation with the EPA, gathered streamgage data in order to confirm the origin of the stream flow spike at Cement Creek and the volume of the spike estimated at three million gallons. USGS also took water and sediment samples and provided both current and historical water quality data to EPA.2
Four months later during her address to a House Committee on Natural Resources, the Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell said, “As is so often the case, it is unfortunate that an incident like this has to happen to highlight an issue that land managers in both the state and federal governments have been grappling with for years – that addressing abandoned mine lands is a nationwide problem, and mitigating toxic substances released from many of them is a significant undertaking. Abandoned mine lands are located on private, state, federal, and tribal lands. There aretens of thousands of abandoned hardrock sites on federal lands alone. Many of these abandoned mine land sites were mined prior to the implementation of federal surface management environmental laws that require reclamation and remediation to take place. For those mine sites where no viable potentially responsible party can be determined, the federal government, and ultimately the taxpayer, often bears the burden of addressing these threats to public safety, human health, the environment, and wildlife, rather than the entities that developed and profited from the operations.”3
In 2018 the U.S. Geological Survey, the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and National Park Service, initiated the Lake Powell Coring Project.4 Its purpose was to retrieve and analyze hydraulic piston cores from Lake Powell sediments—primarily targeting the San Juan River delta—to reconstruct the history of sediment and contaminant deposition, including assessing whether material from the 2015 Gold King Mine spill had been sequestered there. Cores taken from 40 holes penetrated up to the pre-Glen Canyon Dam surface to evaluate metal concentrations, distribution, and bioavailability for water quality impacts.5
Preliminary results shared by USGS scientists in late 2021 shared significant findings: while the 2015 Gold King Mine spill caused detectable spikes in lead and zinc, much larger and “more concerning” spikes wereidentified from mining waste disasters that occurred in the 1970s. The following contaminants were found in core samples:6
Lead: Found in significant spikes, particularly in deeper sediment layers corresponding to mid-20th-century mining disasters.
Zinc: Often found in conjunction with lead; used as a primary indicator of mine waste runoff.
Arsenic: A major concern in the San Juan River delta, often naturally occurring but concentrated by mining processes.
Cadmium: A toxic metal frequently associated with zinc mining that was identified in the core samples.
Copper: Present in the sediment, reflecting the region’s extensive copper mining history.
Mercury: Studied due to its ability to bioaccumulate in the food chain (fish), though much of the mercury in the system is attributed to atmospheric deposition and older mining practices.
Now as Lake Powell’s water levels continue to recede amid prolonged drought and heavy upstream water use, vast expanses of toxic sediments—laden with heavy metals like arsenic, cadmium, copper, mercury, lead, selenium, and zinc from historical mining discharges including the 2015 Gold King spill—are increasingly exposed. This drying creates a heightened risk of human exposure through direct contact during boating, fishing, or shoreline recreation, as well as inhalation of windblown dust carrying bioavailable toxins, potentially leading to respiratory issues, skin irritation, and chronic health effects with repeated exposure. Without expanded monitoring or mitigation measures, these once-submerged hazards now pose an urgent public safety threat to the millions of annual visitors in this popular Southwestern reservoir. 7
Denver Water depends on mountain snowpack for 90% of its water supply, which serves 1.5 million people in Denver and surrounding suburbs.
Snowpack as of Feb. 9, 2026, was near record lows: The Colorado River Basin within Denver Water’s collection system was at 55% of normal. The South Platte River Basin within Denver Water’s collection area was 42% of normal. In Denver Water’s decades of records for its watershed collection areas, as of Feb. 9, the Colorado River snowpack ranked among the worst, and the South Platte River snowpack ranked the worst.
No matter what, Denver Water’s annual summer watering rules will always be in place during the irrigation season. And, it is possible that we will need to implement additional drought response measures this year. Denver Water’s response to drought conditions uses a tiered approach, including the potential for additional watering restrictions, in order to preserve water supplies. Denver Water will move closer to developing recommendations for its Board of Water Commissioners on a potential drought response over the next couple of months.
Since 2000, Denver Water’s response to dry conditions in previous years included issuing a Drought Watch (voluntary restrictions) in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2012 and 2013. In some of those years (2002, 2003, 2004, 2013), Denver Water levied additional drought restrictions as part of declaring a Stage 1 level response, which required mandatory reductions in outdoor water use.
Denver Water snowpack update for Feb. 9, 2026
Conditions remain highly concerning. Poor snowfall combined with warm temperatures have left us roughly 4 feet of snow short of where we’d prefer to be in the Denver Water collection area.
Reservoir storage conditions are below average, but in reasonably good shape: 81% full versus an average of 85% full for this time. Those levels are also artificially affected by the need to keep Gross Reservoir low during construction to raise the dam, a project designed to increase the storage capacity of the reservoir.
Denver Water has been here several times over roughly 50 years of reliable records. On the positive side, we have experienced years that started dry and conditions dramatically improved in March, April and May. This year, however, we are running out of time to build a healthy winter base.
No matter what, Denver Water’s annual summer watering rules will always be in place during the irrigation season. Additional drought restrictions, voluntary or mandatory, will depend in part on how the rest of the snow season shapes up and will be aimed at preserving water supplies in case this unusually dry stretch deepens into a multiyear drought.
Comment from Nathan Elder, Denver Water’s manager of water supply:
“We are running out of winter. Conditions are highly concerning, and as we continue to hope for relief in the spring months, we also are preparing recommendations for our drought response. We encourage customers to think about conservation even now, with smart indoor use and potential changes in landscapes that would reduce outdoor use in the irrigation season.
“Water is a precious resource that supports our way of life across Colorado, from the mountains to the ski resorts to our communities on both sides of the Continental Divide. We all have a role to play in using water responsibly.
“If you’ve been up skiing, you’ve likely seen the low snowpack firsthand, and — if conditions don’t improve — when that snow melts, it won’t be enough to completely fill our reservoirs this spring and summer.”
This chart shows the cumulative snowpack on Feb. 9, 2026, in the area of the Colorado River Basin where Denver Water captures its water supply. The snowpack is 55% of normal, which ranks among the lowest on record for Feb. 9. Image credit: U.S.D.A., Natural Resources Conservation Service.
This chart shows the cumulative snowpack on Feb. 9, 2026, in the area of the South Platte River Basin where Denver Water captures its water supply. The snowpack is 42% of normal, which ranks as the lowest on record for Feb. 9. Image credit: U.S.D.A., Natural Resources Conservation Service.
To learn more about the work Denver Water employees do to monitor the snowpack, read this TAP story about Denver Water employees snowshoeing into the forest near the top of Vail Pass in late January 2026 to conduct a monthly “snow survey.”
Additional information on Denver Water’s drought planning can be found here. Additional information on Denver Water reservoir levels, customer water use and snowpack can be found in the Water Watch Report, which is updated regularly during winter, spring and summer.
Click the link to read the release on the NRCS website:
Warm and dry conditions during January drove Colorado snowpack to record low levels statewide. Late month snowfall was insufficient to change overall conditions, increasing the likelihood of below normal peak SWE and reduced spring runoff across most river basins.
February 10th, 2026 – Warm and dry conditions persisted across Colorado during most of January, which has led to record low snowpack for much of the state. Every major river basin across Colorado received below normal precipitation in January, ranging from 58 percent of median in the Upper Rio Grande river basin to 76 percent of median in the Arkansas river basin. Although there were a series of storm systems during the first and last week of January which delivered snowfall across the state, this was not enough to improve overall conditions. Based on the 1991-2020 median, current statewide snow water equivalent (SWE) is 55 percent of normal, and ranges from 48 percent of normal in the Arkansas river basin to 64 percent of normal in the Laramie-and-North Platte river basin. Since January 13th, snowpack across Colorado has been at record low levels when compared to the 30-year normals, and with only a couple more months left in the typical snow accumulation season, it looks less likely that we will receive enough snowfall by April 1st to achieve normal peak SWE. It would take consistent, record-breaking snowfall for the rest of the season to reach normal peak SWE, and with the long-term outlooks, that is looking highly unlikely. Based on projection plots, even if the state receives average snowfall (50% projection) for the rest of the season, we would end up around 70 percent of median peak SWE (figure 1).
Figure 1: SNOTEL projection plot showing anticipated peak SWE values based on historical data percentiles. Credit: NRCS
Current statewide reservoir storage is 86 percent of median, slightly lower than this same time last year which was 94 percent of median. It’s certainly not ideal to have low reservoir storage during these dry years. With basins below normal reservoir levels will likely face more severe water shortages this upcoming runoff season. All major river basins currently have below normal reservoir storage, except the Upper Rio Grande, South Platte, and Arkansas river basins which are at 120 percent, 102 percent and 100 percent of normal. February 1, 2026 streamflow forecasts at the 50 percent exceedance probability show similar spatial trends as snowpack and precipitation. Current streamflow forecasts are predicting below normal streamflow across the entire state. They range from 28 percent of normal for Sangre de Cristo Creek to 91 percent of normal for the Big Thompson River at Canyon Mouth. Notably, the combined Laramie-North Platte and Colorado Headwaters river basins have the lowest streamflow forecasts in the state at 50 percent and 58 percent of normal. Overall, the record warm and dry conditions that have persisted for much of the 2026 water year have been detrimental for Colorado’s water supply outlook. All current indications are pointing to well-below normal streamflow across the state.
Colorado’s Snowpack and Reservoir Storage as of February 1st, 2026. Credit: NRCS
* San Miguel-Dolores-Animas-San Juan River basin
* *For more detailed information about February mountain snowpack refer to the February 1stColorado Water Supply Outlook Report. For the most up to date information about Colorado snowpack and water supply related information, refer to the Colorado Snow Survey website.
if the Colorado snowpack numbers from SNOTEL stations (52% of median) aren't low enough for you, they get even worse when looking at data across all elevations. Using the University of Arizona's SWE dataset, we're now below one-third of the usual snowpack (32.5%) as of February 9. #cowx
As evaporation rates increase and inflow from the Colorado River falls, Lake Mead’s water volume will shrink but the total mass of dissolved minerals will remain relatively stable. This creates a concentration effect where minerals like calcium, magnesium, and salts, become more densely packed in the remaining water. Without sufficient fresh inflow to dilute these minerals, the water becomes increasingly “hard,” reaching salinity levels that pose significant challenges for regional water management.1
This increasingly hard water is a silent but growing threat to household appliances owned by residents of Las Vegas, because when hard water is heated or left to evaporate, minerals like calcium and magnesium precipitate out of the liquid, forming a rock-hard crust known as limescale. This buildup acts as an insulator in water heaters, forcing them to work harder to heat water, and clogs the delicate internal components of dishwashers and washing machines. Over time, these deposits restrict water flow and corrode seals, leading to premature mechanical failure and leaks.2
The financial burden of these mineral-heavy waters translates to shorter lifecycles for major appliances and higher utility bills. Residents may find themselves replacing water heaters every 8 years instead of the typical 12 to 15, and the efficiency loss from scale buildup can increase energy costs for water heating by as much as 25%. Between more frequent appliance replacements, the cost of professional plumbing repairs, and the potential need for expensive water softening systems, the long-term economic impact on a single household can reach thousands of dollars.3
While drinking water with elevated TDS is generally considered safe by regulatory standards, it can have some noticeable effects. Very high concentrations of minerals like sulfates can cause a laxative effect or gastrointestinal discomfort in sensitive individuals or those unaccustomed to the water. While the body requires minerals like calcium and magnesium, excessive levels can affect the water’s smell and its taste, which may motivate residents to rely more on bottled water or on in-home filtration units like reverse-osmosis, which incrementally drives up the cost of living.4
A 2013 complaint that Texas was being deprived by New Mexico of its equitable apportionment of Rio Grande Compact water has finally been resolved and the compact decree approved by the special master in the case.
In a Fourth Interim Report dated Feb. 6, Hon. D. Brooks Smith agreed with the negotiated settlement by the states and the federal government that specifies how much compact water released by Colorado ends up with New Mexico and how much with Texas.
The proposed compact decree, which has to be accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court, employs use of the “Effective El Paso Index (‘Index’),” which provides a means of tracking the movement of water below Elephant Butte Reservoir for Texas’ accounting.
“Much like the river whose water the parties have quarreled over for decades, this original action has proceeded in a meandering fashion. First articulated by Texas in its 2013 Complaint, the dispute, in some sense, began about 8,000 years ago, in ancient Mesopotamia, when the Sumerians invented the concept of irrigation and incited a run on Earth’s navigable waterways,” Smith wrote in his report to the U.S. Supreme Court.
For its part, New Mexico countered that it was “excess water consumption in Texas” that interfered with the compact reporting. The standoff between the two states, with Colorado as a third party, lasted until July 3, 2023, when then-Special Master Michael J. Melloy issued a Third Interim Report (“TIR”) on the matter, which began: “Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado . . . have filed a joint motion to enter a consent decree compromising and settling ‘all claims among them arising from the 1938 Rio Grande Compact.’”
The proposed 2023 compact decree was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected it at the request of the federal government, and appointed a new special master in Smith. He brought the states and federal government back together for another round of talks, and in June of 2025 visited the lower Rio Grande to talk to farmers and to familiarize himself with the features of the basin.
“I am grateful to the parties, the amici, and all of counsel for their cooperative efforts in organizing and carrying out what was a highly informative and comprehensive real-time view of both the waters of the Lower Rio Grande and the Project,” Smith wrote in his report.
The Effective El Paso Index (“Index”), which is a feature of the proposed compact decree, measures compliance based on the amount of water that actually passes through the El Paso Gage.
“I am pleased that the Special Master has recommended the U.S. Supreme Court accept the parties’ proposed settlement of the Rio Grande Compact litigation. The settlement is the result of collaboration between Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and the United States; it includes entry of a proposed Compact Decree and dismissal of the United States’ claims,” said Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser. “I appreciate the Special Master’s thoughtful engagement in the matter and his recommendation supporting this collaborative result. His recommendation gets even closer to the finish line.”
The last step will be a decision from the Supreme Court, which Weiser said he hopes to receive by June.
Map showing new point to deliver Rio Grande water between Texas and New Mexico, at an existing stream gage in East El Paso. (Courtesy of Margaret “Peggy” Barroll in the joint motion)
