Click the link to read the paper on the Getches-Wilkinson Center website (Eric Kuhn, Anne Castle, Carlos de la Parra, John Fleck, Jack Schmidt, Kathryn Sorensen, Katherine Tara). Here’s the abstract:
March 26, 2026
Since 1945, the United States and Mexico have managed common interests on their two largest shared rivers systems, the Colorado and the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande, under the terms of the 1944 international treaty that was designed from the beginning with tools to adapt to changing hydrologic and societal conditions. A recent emergency agreement on the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande illustrates what is possible, and with old river management rules on the Colorado both within the United States and between the United States and Mexico about to expire, we are at a moment of opportunity for meaningful change. The core problem on the Colorado River, which we address in the analysis that follows, arose from decisions made in the first half of the 20th century to allocate fixed volumes of water. As usage patterns and hydrology change in the 21st century, fixed volumes no longer work. [ed. emphasis mine] A shift to a percentage-based split between the United States and Mexico on the Colorado River, based on the river’s actual natural flow, would provide a solid foundation for the two countries’ joint management of the Colorado in the decades to come.
Study reach in the Cliff-Gila Valley, showing the three study transect locations for this work: upstream perennial (UP), seasonally dewatered (SD) and downstream perennial (DP); major irrigation diversion sites and the approximate regions where the channel was seasonally dewatered by diversions in normal and extremely dry years. The dewatered region is magnified in the inset figure to show the position of the Fort West ditch overflow channel. USGS gaging station 09430500 is located at the upstream end of the valley. Gila River flows from north to south.
Click the link to access the research paper on the Wiley Online Library website (Ellen Soles, Martha Cooper, Laurel Saito). Here’s the abstract:
In arid regions with limited water supplies like the Colorado River basin of the southwestern United States, flow regimes and water availability are major controls on native riparian ecosystems resilience, persistence and function. In this paper, we share a case study that uses a long-term dataset of topographic, vegetation and groundwater data collected over water years 2011–2021 to demonstrate how secondary channels formed during high flow events enhance groundwater-dependent riparian ecosystem resilience, favouring native over non-native vegetation. In the Cliff-Gila Valley of southwestern New Mexico, channelization and levee construction between 1940 and 1980 profoundly altered the floodplain and channel of the Gila River, a Colorado River tributary. During subsequent large floods, river anastomosis (branching) left a network of secondary channels across the floodplain. Long-term data show that these channels improve vegetation access to groundwater, facilitating regeneration and expansion of diverse native groundwater-dependent vegetation. Data also show that even the lowest perennial flows (0.4–0.6 m3 s−1) sustain rates of groundwater recession favourable to successful native riparian seedling recruitment in the topographic lows created by secondary channels. Alluvial groundwater recedes more sharply in a reach seasonally dewatered by irrigation diversions, but seepage through diversion structures and unlined ditches maintains shallow groundwater levels. This case study demonstrates that even in arid regions, robust native groundwater-dependent riparian areas can co-exist with human water demands when large floods can move across broad floodplains and create topographic complexity. [ed. emphasis mine] The study also highlights the importance of long-term datasets for documenting ecosystem resilience to floods, drought and ongoing climate change.
Warm and dry conditions in Western Colorado are speeding up runoff from an already below normal snowpack. And it is causing concern among communities. “There are smaller communities that have a single source of drinking water supply that are concerned about what their source is going to be producing as the summer goes on if the snow melts out too quickly,” said [Christina] Medved…Another concern is having enough water for irrigation.
“The green grass lawns, the big parks and fields, they take a lot of water to keep green. And so, we’ve already been hearing from communities that if they have to, they will stop watering those fields,” said Medved.
The dry season we have had also means concern for wildfire season. “If you have an early melt out and you’re able to dry out the landscape by June, June tends to be a drier month. And so that tends to be associated with some higher-than-normal fire danger,” said Goble.
Colorado’s top-25 March heat waves since 1951, defined as 4-day averaged statewide temperatures. Colorado’s warmest heat wave (set last week, March 18-21) eclipsed its previous warmest heat wave (March 23-26, 2004) by nearly 5°F. Data from NCEI nclimgrid via the Colorado Climate Center
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
March 30, 2026
It was weird, it was wacky. This string of summer days in Colorado that arrived around the first day of spring was extraordinary. Will it change us in some fundamental way?
It’s not like 9/11, the day we saw people jumping from the skyscrapers in New York City to escape an even more cruel death by fire. We knew instantly that the world was different and in a very big way.
But doesn’t this anomaly deserve more than a shrug of the shoulders? As summer arrived in the last days of winter, I heard several people say, “Well, enjoy this nice weather” as you passed through their doors. A well-intentioned pleasantry but detached from a vital truth. Nice weather for Arizona maybe, but this was Colorado.
Winter had altogether been very, very warm. November was the third warmest November on record across Colorado. December the warmest. February also broke records.
Then came March. Alamosa, a town at 7,543 feet in elevation in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, notched 11 record highs during March going into the last weekend. This included nine in a row from March 18-26. Of special note was the record high of 83 degrees recorded on March 21. It broke the old record by 7 degrees. It also was a higher temperature than has ever been recorded in Alamosa in April.
Crested Butte had a high temperature of 68, a full 10 degrees higher than the old record for that date.
Dates of first 90°F or warmer day in Fort Collins from 1895-present. The blue dashed line shows the 1991-2020 mean 90°F or warmer day, which is June 9. Data from ACIS.
Fort Collins got to 91 degrees, also 10 degrees more than the old record for that date. It was the highest ever mark for March — but also higher than anything ever recorded in April, whose record remains 89 degrees. The average first day for 90 degrees in Fort Collins is June 15.
Allie Mazurek, of the Colorado Climate Center staff, posted a report on Thursday morning that defines in numbers what she calls an event “impossible to ignore.” Included in her presentation is the chart atop this essay that shows how anomalous this four-day streak of heat was compared to others in Colorado during March.
This heat was nearly uniform across Colorado. “There were far more stations in the state that broke all-time monthly high records for March than did not,” wrote Mazurek. “To see monthly records shattered by more than 5 degrees F across numerous stations is truly remarkable. The kind of heat that we saw last week across Colorado is more typical of June or even July.”
Remarkable about theheat in Colorado was not only its intensity but its longevity across four days (March 18-21). “Over that period, several locations set new monthly records every one of those days, with each day being warmer than the last.”
March maximum temperature records at various long-term weather stations throughout Colorado. Data from ACIS.
This heat comes at a particularly bad time. The thin snowpack was already melting. The deepest snowpack in Colorado’s mountains has traditionally occurred in early May, because of accumulations at higher elevations.
That assumes a normal of some sort — although it is questionable whether “normal” has any true meaning given how fast the climate is now changing. So take this for what it’s worth: the statewide snowpack this past week sat at 38% of the 1991-2020 median. And what must be noted here — as with the temperature records that were broken — is that we have had an exceptional increase of heat in Colorado in the last 25 years.
Notable in the lifetimes of baby boomers in Colorado were the winters of 1976-77 and 1980-81. This year’s meager runoff will almost certainly surpass those dry years. New is the heat.
High-pressure heat domes can be predicted but are notoriously challenging to forecast weeks or months in advance. They also remain rare, but the warming atmosphere makes them more likely.
“We do have high pressures every year across the West,” said Mark Wankowski, a meteorologist at the Pueblo office of the National Weather Service. “This one was extremely early.”
Writing from Colorado Springs last weekend in an essay in The Atlantic titled “There’s No Way the West Will Have a Normal Summer,” Rebecca Boyle explained that the heat wave was created by a “a bizarrely strong ridge of high pressure in Earth’s atmosphere.” This ridge suppressed cloud formation and brought in warmer air. “Such atmospheric ridges are more common in the summer, but this one would be unusually intense even for that season.
Kaitlyn Trudeau, a senior researcher at the science nonprofit Climate Central, told Boyle this was the strongest ridge ever observed in March. Climate Central has developed a prediction model that assesses how much a warming trend or record high can be attributed to human-caused climate change. According to this model, the western high temps were five times more likely because of elevated greenhouse gas emissions.
I feel rattled by this heat. You may remember the high-pressure cooker that broiled the Pacific Northwest in June 2021. Temperatures spiked to 116 degrees in Portland. People in apartments that were not air conditioned died from the heat. In Multnomah County, the location of Portland, 72 deaths were attributed to heat. Farther north, in British Columbia, the town of Lytton went up in flames after several days of intense heat, including a temperature that reached 121 degrees Fahrenheit.
After that heat, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission asked Xcel to assess how well it could respond to somewhat similar heat in Colorado. The company concluded it had the resources.
But this week, in the wake of the intense spring heat, the PUC commissioners were clearly worried, part of a growing concern about “resource adequacy.” Will Xcel be able to meet critical electrical needs if another heat dome arrives in Colorado this summer? The commissioners asked Xcel to return with strategies for reducing demand from big industrial customers if demand for cooling spikes.
Colorado Drought Monitor map March 24, 2026.
Curious about an on-the-ground perspective from this heat and sparse snow, I called Paul Bonnifield in Yampa. A drought map colors that part of northwest Colorado mahogany, beyond extreme drought and in the realm of “exceptional.” What did exceptional drought look like to him?
Yampa lies at the headwaters of the Yampa River, between the Gore Range and the Flattops. It has a bucolic setting, a place of hay meadows and grazing cattle. Lying upstream are a couple of reservoirs on the edge of the Flattops.
It’s not uncommon for snow to remain on the ground at Yampa, elevation, 7,900 feet, in late March. Not this year. “The ground is hard, just dry, dry, dry,” said Bonnifield.
Bonnifield grew up a few miles away at Phippsburg, a railroad town, and he worked on the railroad himself in addition to spending time teaching and writing at a college in Oklahoma. He’s now in his late 80s and can put this year’s anomalous heat and drought into perspective.
“We are in serious trouble,” he said. “I’ve never seen it like this before.”
Less water will mean less hay production in Egeria Park, where this photo was taken about eight years ago. Photo/Allen Best
Unless a miracle arrives in the form of spring rain and snow, ranchers in Bonnifield’s area — called Egeria Park — will have to decide what to do with their cattle. There’s not enough water to grow grass. There will be wildfire smoke besotting the sky, dampening tourism. And as for river rafting downstream on the Yampa – not likely. Steamboat Spring has already imposed watering restrictions for lawns.
Denver Water this week adopted lawn-watering restrictions for its customers in Denver as well as those in surrounding jurisdictions. It has 1.5 million customers, directly and indirectly, in the metro area.
Nathan Elder, the utility’s manager of water supply, reported to board members on Wednesday that snowpack levels are at historic lows and melting earlier and more rapidly.
Denver Water diverts water from rivers and creeks on both sides of the Continental Divide. In Grand and Summit counties, at the headwaters of the Colorado River, the snowpack was 53% of normal and the lowest on record for the date, Elder said. The South Platte River has it even worse, just 40% of normal.
“These are really unprecedented snowpack conditions,” he said at the meeting on March 25. During the previous week — the week of the heat dome —Denver had lost 25% of its snowpack in the areas it collects water, he reported.
Denver Water is asking the 1.5 million households and businesses that get water from the utility to refrain from starting to irrigate lawns, including this one in southeast Denver, until mid-May. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Can it get worse? Well, yes, it could. “It’s well documented that, in part, due to climate change, the runoff generated from a given snowpack has declined when compared to the past,” said Elder. “So we can expect even less water from this already low snowpack.”
Might a miracle arrive? After the drought and heat of 2002, metro Denver was stressed. Then, on St. Patrick’s Day 2003, three feet of snow fell. In the San Luis Valley, monster rainfall last fall swelled the Rio Grande, leaving water in the soil that will help even now as farmers begin preparing their fields for early plantings.
NOAA projects continued likelihood of above normal temperatures and below-normal precipitation across Colorado, including Denver’s collection area, during April.
Denver aims to reduce water use 20% by its customers in Denver and in outlying suburbs. It will permit lawn watering two days per week and then after 6 p.m. or before 10 a.m. It is also urging customers to refrain from watering their lawns until mid-May. That’s not an easy ask when it feels like June in March. In April, Denver Water’s board members will be asked to approve “drought pricing.”
Russ Schumacher, the state climatologist in Colorado, is called upon frequently to give programs to water organizations and others. This past week he gave a presentation to the Fort Collins Chapter of the Colorado Renewable Energy Society.
“Wildfire certainly is top of mind,” he said while showing a time-lapse video of a wildfire called High Park Fire that occurred west of Fort Collins in 2012.
Dry and hot temperatures leave Russ Schumacher, the state climatologist, apprehensive about potential wildfires this year. Above photo is from the Longmont area in August 2020, a hot and smoky year when wildfires continued almost into November. Photo/Allen Best
Global warming is a simple proposition, he said.
“If you put a pot of water on your stove you’re not going to be able to predict all those individual bubbles or exactly when it’s going to start boiling,” he explained. “But you know that when you turn that heat on, the water’s going to get warmer and it’s going to continue to warm the more heat that you add. So the physics of climate change is actually rather similar in that regard.”
And, of course, adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere traps heat, which heats the planet. “When you add heat to something, then it warms.”
Colorado has had outliers of heat before. The Dust Bowl during the mid-1930s was a time of heat and drought. More hot and dry arrived in the 1950s.
This chart shows snowpack in Colorado. The heat dome caused rapid melting of snow. In the San Luis Valley, heavy rains of last October may allow farmers to survive better than during 2002.
Dry has not changed. The hot has changed. What used to be an extremely hot year in Colorado is now a fairly average year or just slightly-above-average year, said Schumacher.
Citing NOAA data, Schumacher showed a sharp rise of almost 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1980. The heat has been most acute in the summer and fall — although, obviously, recent months spoil that easy narrative.
With a moderate rate of emissions, we can expect another 2.5 to 3 degrees of warming by around 2050. That expectation comes with a disclaimer about uncertainty. It’s a best guess.
Precipitation has been more complicated than temperature in Colorado. As for the future, it remains a puzzle. Could be more, could be less. Either way, it will be impacted by temperatures.
“If it’s warmer, if it‘s windier, it’s less humid, the air is thirstier for water from the soils, crops, forests, reservoirs, wherever.” Schumacher said. “As it gets warmer, that evaporative demand goes up. The air is thirstier for water, and this has big implications for drought and water supply and water resources.”
Might warming occur more slowly? That’s possible, and a possibility tied strongly to whether global emissions of greenhouse gases can be abated. Given the current political climate in the United States, a key player in world politics, this low-emissions scenario looks highly unlikely. More likely are the heat domes.
Like the pot of water on the stove that Schumacher described, we’re certain to see more heat bubbles. Hard to tell where and when they will be, but there will be more of them. That leaves me distinctly uncomfortable. In Colorado I have felt 104 degrees. I cannot fathom the 118 degrees of Portland.
Colorado statewide annual temperature anomaly (°F) with respect to the 1901-2000 average. Graphic credit: Colorado Climate Center
With far less snowpack in the high country this year and an anemic runoff forecast, the Uncompahgre Valley is positioned for a terrible irrigation season. Water users association Manager Steve Pope did not mince words.
“This is the worst year on record so far for snowpack. Looking at the fact that it’s pushing 90 degrees outside in March, we aren’t going to be able to expect much of a runoff,” Pope said on Wednesday, one week before water deliveries begin on April 1, ” … There is no good news.”
The Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association will only be delivering allocations to shareholders of 50% to start, and, if water models remain consistent, will cut delivery to 40%. No pump contracts can be filled this year, although there will be credits for next year for paid accounts. Shareholders who pump directly from an association canal or lateral must register pumps and install meters and regulating valves for the deliveries. As well, people are being asked to reconsider lawns and large-scale landscaping to conserve every drop possible for agriculture…
Runoff projections within the Uncompahgre Basin are worrying. The Colorado River Basin Forecast Center operates SNOTEL sites that measure snowpack and snow water equivalent, the amount of water the snow holds. Ideally, there would be robust snowpack and SWE, as well as weather conditions conducive to slower melt, leading to prolonged runoff. That isn’t the case this year…2026 is on track to turn out even worse than 2002, the leanest water year this century — but even 2002 was bookended with decent water years before and after…Pope said the Colorado River Basin Forecast Center is projecting a 50% chance of the local watershed seeing about 53,000 acre feet of runoff…The water users association can’t really rely on natural flow from the Uncompahgre River this year, Pope said, but he does anticipate enough to fill Ridgway Reservoir. Beyond that, however, “it’s not very promising.” Overall weather conditions compound the problem of so-so snowfall during the winter: it’s been warmer far up in the high country, too. Pope said that at the 12,200-foot elevation Swamp Angel study site maintained by the Silverton-based Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies, it’s only been getting down to a few degrees below freezing at night. (This site had a measured snow water equivalent of 13.4 inches as of March 15.)
“If it’s not freezing at night, there’s nothing to slow the runoff down. They said the dust isn’t as bad this year. That is somewhat of a silver lining. We haven’t had the wind, so the dust isn’t quite as bad,” said Pope. Dust accelerates snowmelt.
With the quicker snowmelt and earlier drying out of pasturelands, runoff volumes in creeks are hitting levels now that usually occur a month later in the spring, leading area ranchers to activate irrigation ditches weeks earlier than usual. Runoff flowing down Fish Creek, the primary water source for the city of Steamboat Springs, is almost one month ahead of the historical average. At 9 p.m. March 21, the flow displayed by the U.S. Geological Survey gauge on Fish Creek near the Fish Creek Water Plant east of Steamboat Springs showed 62 cubic feet per second. That volumetric flow rate is usually seen on April 18, according to gauge records from 1966 to 2025…“Over the last two years, it’s definitely running sooner than average,” said Frank Alfone, general manager at Mount Werner Water and Sanitation District. “It just means the possibility of having to release from Fish Creek Reservoir earlier in the season because there is less water in the creek.” The water gauge on Fish Creek historically records a peak seasonal flow of 464 cfs on June 8, but this summer the peak will occur much sooner than average. For waterfall fans, that also means highly visited Fish Creek Falls figures to be at peak flow three to four weeks sooner than its average early June date, Alfone noted…Fish Creek Reservoir on Tuesday was sitting at 47% of fill capacity, a normal level for this time of year, and that percentage continues to increase, Alfone noted. As a major year-round water source for the community, Fish Creek Reservoir water managers do not want that level to drop below 30%, Alfone said.
The Pinto Valley Mine, processing area, and tailings depositories in the Globe-Miami mining district. Pinto Creek is to the viewer’s left. Source: Google Earth.
Pinto Creek used to run year-round. Bubbling up from springs and occasional snowmelt in the Pinal Mountains of central Arizona, it nourished a riparian ribbon of green through the rocky, arid landscape, shaded by sycamores, willows, and alders, until it empties into Theodore Roosevelt Reservoir. Gila topminnow, longfin dace, and roundtail chub plied its waters. Even during drought years it reliably delivered at least 1,000 acre-feet of water at its Magma Weir gauge, and in wet times as much as 39,000 acre-feet annually might flow along its bed.
Then, a little over a decade ago, something odd happened. The flow volume plummeted from 4,147 acre-feet in 2013 to just 482 acre-feet in 2014, and ever since the once year-round stream has run only intermittently and at similarly diminished levels. Towering trees along its banks have died and toppled, and the green swath has lost much of its color. It’s possible that long-term aridification simply caught up with the little stream, as 2013 was a dry year. But there’s a more likely culprit: In October 2013 Capstone Copper Corporation acquired the nearby Pinto Valley Mine, a massive, open pit copper and molybdenum operation that had just emerged from several years of dormancy, and resumed heavy groundwater pumping from its Peak Well field.
While correlation is not causation, the Tonto National Forest saw enough evidence of a link to ask the Arizona Department of Water Resources to put the brakes on the mine’s groundwater pumping. Failing to do so would harm the Forest Service’s instream Pinto Creek water right — along with the downstream riparian ecosystem it supports. The state did nothing and the Forest Service dropped the complaint and approved the mine’s expansion in 2021.
The Land Desk has often looked at mining’s effects on water quality.1 But the Pinto Valley case highlights the fact that mines can also affect water quantity — and vice versa, as water scarcity can limit mining operations. It warrants a closer look during these water-constrained times, when water consumption by everything from data centers to golf courses to alfalfa farms has attracted more scrutiny.
A mining operation goes through water in two ways. First, the mine itself, whether underground or open pit, can act like a well. Dig a hole into the earth, and groundwater will flow into it. While gravity can drain this flow in underground mines burrowed into the sides of mountains, the water must be pumped from open pit and underground shaft mines, a practice known as dewatering, which can take large amounts of water out of the aquifer. Capstone says it pumps about 400 gallons per minute from its pit.
This draws down groundwater wells and can dry up springs and diminish streamflows. Without dewatering, you end up with something like the Berkeley Pit, which is now a 50-billion-gallon, acidic and contaminated lake that’s about 900 feet deep. Because this water is usually contaminated by acid mine drainage, it often can’t be reused without some treatment, and dumping it into a stream or back into the aquifer is also problematic.
A mining operation also requires significant amounts of water for dust control, mineral processing, slurrying, and other uses. Capstone’s 2024 sustainability report says its Pinto Valley Mine withdrew a total of 8,932 acre-feet — or 2.9 billion gallons — of groundwater and surface water.
West Drought Monitor map March 24, 2026.
The company has not released its 2025 data yet, but in financial filings reported that the Pinto Valley Mine had to slash mine production and mill throughput by about 37% in 2025 due to “unplanned downtime driven by water constraints due to the drought conditions in central Arizona.” The company is trying to address this by reducing per-ton water usage by 20%, but that may not be enough given the extreme drought conditions spreading across the Southwest.
A central clearing house or database of mine water use in Arizona does not exist, but various sources can help paint a picture of how much water the mining industry in the state uses (I’ll look at other states in a future dispatch).
Safford Mine Complex: Consumptive water use increased from 3,624 acre-feet per year to 6,099 af/yr following a 2020 expansion, according to the Arizona Department of Water Resources 2025 Safford supply and demand report. Municipal uses in the Safford Basin use about 6,000 acre-feet per year, while agriculture — primarily for cotton, pecans, pistachios, and alfalfa — consumes about 138,301 acre-feet annually.
Freeport-McMoran reported to the AZDWR that in 2023 it withdrew 22,490 acre-feet of groundwater for its Sierrita Mine south of Tucson. The cost? $3.50 per acre-foot. That’s about one penny for 1,000 gallons of water.
Freeport-McMoran’s Morenci Mine, one of the nation’s largest copper operations, uses about 14,000 acre-feet per year on average, according to the AZDWR. The mine imports much of its water from the Black River, a tributary to the Salt River, under a lease with the San Carlos Apache Tribe for a portion of its Central Arizona Project allocation.
The following chart is from an Arizona Department of Mines & Mineral Resources report from 2010 by Dr. Madan M. Singh. It’s a nice, comprehensive look at how much water the state’s major mines used in the preceding years. Current use is likely about the same, except that now there are additional mines (the Pinto Valley Mine was not operational in 2010, which is why it’s missing).
Source: Water Consumption at Copper Mines in Arizona, by Dr. Madan M. Singh, 2010.
So, according to Singh’s report, Arizona’s largest mines used a total of 55,659 acre-feet per year during the 2000s. Add the Pinto Valley Mine (8,932 af) and Safford Mine (6,099 af) and you get about 70,600 acre-feet per year, or 23 billion gallons annually.
That’s a lot of water, but it pales in comparison to many other uses. Arizona alfalfa, alone, probably uses more than 1.5 million acre-feet (based on 6 af water/acre over 280,000 planted acres, according to the USDA). “Turf facilities” guzzled some 157,000 af in 2024, according to the AZDWR, while power generation used 86,053 acre-feet. TSMC’s north Phoenix chip manufacturing facility is projected initially to use about 19,000 acre-feet of water annually.
In other words, when Arizona’s water cops come looking for the big water users, the mines probably won’t be at the top of their list. Since most mines rely on groundwater, Colorado River water shortages may not affect them too much, at least in the near future.
Still, some mines, including ASARCO’s Mission Mine, do pull some water from the Central Arizona Project, which could be hit hard by the Colorado River crisis as early as next year. And, as the Pinto Valley Mine situation last year demonstrated, continued aridification and relentless pumping could lead to groundwater shortages at the mines, forcing them to reduce production even as they work to become more water-efficient.
Prospective mines could face serious challenges, as well. Resolution Copper estimates its contentious Oak Flat mine would use between 15,700 acre-feet and 20,000 acre-feet per year. Others, however, say this is too low; one study says it would likely be closer to 50,000 acre-feet annually, based on the per-ton water consumption for copper at other Arizona mines. Resolution has said it would rely at least partly on Central Arizona Project water, the security of which grows shakier with each passing year. It’s hard to imagine that there will be any water available for new users by the time that mine is up and running if current climatic trends continue.
That may be what Faraday Copper had in mind when it signed a letter of intent to acquire the San Manuel copper mine in southern Arizona. While Faraday said it would be reopening the long-shuttered operation and combining it with its proposed Copper Creek venture nearby, it may also be eying the substantial water rights BHP Copper holds for the San Manuel Mine. Those could come in handy if and when the Copper Creek facility is developed.
Regardless, however, one thing is clear: Any new mine is going to rob the springs, the streams, and the wildlife and communities that rely on them of at least some of their precious water. [ed. emphasis mine]
1 In 1993, when the Pinto Valley Mine was operated by Magma Copper, a large rain event “overwhelmed the mine’s water management capabilities,” causing the reservoir to overflow the tailings pile, tear out a levee, and carry hundreds of tons of tailings and millions of gallons of contaminated water into Pinto Creek. The creek was found to have low pH (high acidity) and high concentrations of cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, and zinc, resulting in significant fish die off, specifically of desert or Gila Mountain suckers.
Click the link to read the article on the Pagosa Springs Sun website (Clayton Chaney). Here’s an excerpt:
March 26, 2026
It was warmer last week in Pagosa Country than any other time on record, as the area saw five consecutive days of record high temperatures set from March 18-22. According to forecasts posted by Shawn Prochazka with Pagosa Weather, a new record high for the month of March was set on Wednesday, March 18, at 74 degrees and again on Thursday, March 19, at 76 degrees. The previous record high for the month of March was set in 1907 and 1940 at 73 degrees. Record highs for the month continued on Friday, March 20, with temperatures reaching 79 degrees. The previous record for that date was 68 degrees, set in 1997. Prochazka also notes that record high temperatures were set on Saturday, March 21, at 77 degrees, and on Sunday, March 22, at 74 degrees…
Snowpack
According to data from the Natural Resource Conservation Services (NRCS), as of 11 a.m. on Wednesday, March 25, Wolf Creek Pass at 10,930 feet had a snow water equivalent of 12 inches, compared to that date’s median of 27.3 inches. That amount is 44 percent of that date’s median snow water equivalent. The San Miguel, Dolores, Animas and San Juan river basins as a whole are listed at 21 percent of its 30-year median snowpack. The Wolf Creek summit had the second highest current snow water equivalent in the San Miguel, Dolores, Animas and San Juan river basins, and the Upper Rio Grande basin, behind the Black Mesa site with 12.2 inches of snow water equivalent as of press time Wednesday…
Colorado Drought Monitor map March 24, 2026.
Drought
According to the most recent map released by the U.S. Drought Monitor on Thursday, March 19, 100 percent of Archuleta County remains in moderate drought stage, with 22.04 percent of the county being in a severe drought stage. Areas that are in a severe drought stage lie along the eastern border of the county with Conejos County. Meanwhile, 12.88 percent of the state is in an extreme drought stage, and less than 1 percent of the state is in an exceptional drought stage. That includes portions of Pitkin, Eagle, Summit, Lake and Park counties…
River flows
According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), as of 11 a.m. on Wednesday, March 25, the San Juan River in downtown Pagosa Springs had a flow rate of 595 cubic feet per second (cfs). The record high flow for that date was recorded in 2004 at 860 cfs, while the record low was recorded in 1964 at 42 cfs. The median flow for that date is 165 cfs, and the mean flow is 239 cfs. The Piedra River near Arboles was flowing at a rate of 434 cfs as of 11 a.m Wednesday, March 24, according to the USGS. The median flow for that date is 339 cfs, and the mean flow is 457 cfs. The record high flow for that date was recorded in 1993 at 1,400 cfs, while the record low was recorded in 1964 at 45 cfs.
Rio Grande levy near Alamosa, November 2024. Photo credit: The Alamosa Citizen
The theme this year was “Where Water Connects Us: Past Meets Present in the San Luis Valley”. Paul Formisano and the staff and volunteers from the Salazar Rio Grande del Norte Center delivered a varied, timely and interesting agenda!
San Luis People’s Ditch March 17, 2018. Photo credit: Greg Hobbs
Ken Salazar set the stage for the sessions, reminding attendees that, “Early settlers knew the only way to bring prosperity to the valley was to do it collectively as the early acequias did.”
Upper Rio Grande snowpack March 29, 2026. Credit: NRCS
The first session was titled, “State of the Rio: The 2026 river outlook general basin and compact projections” and the general consensus from the speakers was, as Brad Udall recently said about the Upper Colorado River Basin, “There is no historical analog,” for these conditions. Snow drought is front and center in the San Luis Valley these days.
Upper Rio Grande accumulated precipitation March 29, 2026. Credit: NRCS
Precipitation in the basin started out the water year in great shape due to a big rain event in early October. Since then there have been modest accumulations but has flattened out since late February to date.
Colorado SNOTEL basin-filled snowpack map March 28, 2026. Credit: NRCS
Division Engineer Craig Cotten started off his presentation with the basin-filled snowpack map for Colorado. He joked that, “The good news is, the Rio Grande is not the worst in the state.” It is not a good year as far as #snowpack and many SNOTEL locations are already melted-out.
Slide credit: Craig Cotten
Projected streamflow is not looking good and the forecast will likely be worse when the April 1, 2026 numbers are released by the NRCS. However, streamflow right now is looking okay, there is a lot of water in the #RioGrande at this time for example. That means that the little snowpack in the basin is already coming off.
Slide credit: Craig Cotten
Reservoir storage is in good shape (as a percent of average) except Sanchez Reservoir which has been drawn down for maintenance and repairs.
Current compliance numbers for the Rio Grande Compact from Craig Cotten. Photo credit: Chris Lopez/Alamosa Citizen
Colorado’s Rio Grande Compact compliance numbers heading into the scary diversion season are a positive. There is no debt owed to New Mexico and Texas. With the early onset to runoff season the State Engineer allowed irrigation to start on March 23, 2026. Current estimated streamflow for the Rio Grande at Del Norte (the compact USGS gage used for the river) is 305,000 acre-feet which carries a compact obligation of 76,000 acre-feet to New Mexico and Texas. For the Conejos River the estimated upper index annual flow is 165,000 acre-feet and the downstream obligation is 27,500 acre-feet. However, water levels are going to drop in the unconfined aquifer significantly this year due to low flows in the river. The situation in the aquifer is bad and it is going to get worse.
Cotten updated the attendees about the Rio Grande Compact lawsuit status. It is mostly a fight between Texas and New Mexico and the latest stipulated agreement has been approved by the Special Master. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to approve the agreement.
Nathan Coombs, in keepting with the symposium theme said, “I believe we’re going to be alright this season we’re going to survive. People in the San Luis Valley are working together and we’re going to get through it.”
Slide credit: Heather Dutton
Heather Dutton gave an overview of reservoir operations for 2026. It is possible that all irrigation water will be released in April and May. She added, “If you’re going to fish the streams emphasize fishing in the morning and visit one of our valley breweries in the afternoon. It’s going to be tough year for all of us. Please keep the farmers in mind.”
Reclamation informed attendees about the current status of the Closed Basin Project. Project priorities are:
Colorado’s compact deliveries
Mitigation for construction and pumping
Eliminate Colorado’s Rio Grande Compact deficit
Other beneficial uses/irrigation
Slide from Amber Pacheco
The session “Twenty years of subdistricts” illustrated how the well owners have been working together over the years to determine a solution to the declining unconfined aquifer. Because groundwater is not separate from surface water the lowered levels in the aquifer affect surface streamflow in the Rio Grande. Valley pumpers have formed several sub-districts fashioned around the different hydrology in areas of the aquifer and are retiring some wells and taking land out of production. Another strategy used has been o develop augmentation plans to offset pumping. All of the strategies involve fees to sub-district members. There is extensive coverage of the issue on Coyote Gulch if you are interested in taking a trip down memory lane.
Slide credit: Rachel James
The session “Flowing together: Agriculture, rivers, and communities in partnership” was an overview of collaboration between the City of Alamosa, the West Side Ditch, and Rio Grande Headwaters Restoration Project on the river at the east side of Alamosa. It included a new headgate for the ditch company and will include a new levy orientation and access to the river from Cole Park. The speakers emphasized that it would not have happened without collaboration and the emphasis on creating a win for all stakeholders. For example, Bill Schoen credited the Rio Grande Headwaters Restoration Project for finding funding for the new headgate which is often a problem for mutual ditch companies. Daniel Boyes of the Restoration Project said that the new headgate helps fish and safety for boaters.
Rio Grande, Colorado | National Park Service
The final session before the keynote was “Perspectives on valley recreation” where access to public lands and the value of building a recreation economy to bolster valley opportunities were discussed. While 39% of Colorado’s agricultural output is from the valley economic activity is seasonal. The discussion centered around bringing tourism to the valley to improve the outlook for employment and economic growth.
The keynote speaker was Ben Golfarb and it was a real treat. I never tire of learning about “Nature’s Engineers” and the amazing effect this keystone species has on hydrology and habitat. Trapped extensively by fur traders to enable the fashion industry in the 19th century the species was nearly extirpated from the North American West. Along with a torrent of information and photographs, Goldfarb informed attendees that the native tribes did not participate in trapping because of their understanding of beaver’s role in the arid lands.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
River managers need to conserve around 1.7 million acre-feet in Lake Powell to keep the reservoir from dropping below hydropower turbines this year, according to federal government projections. The Bureau of Reclamation, a federal agency that manages dams on the Colorado River, has estimated that reservoir levels could fall below required elevations for hydropower production before August as record-low snowpack turns into pitiful flows in streams and rivers.
“The situation is dire, the stakes have never been higher, and the reservoirs have never been drier,” Estevan Lopez, New Mexico’s negotiator on interstate Colorado River matters, said during a meeting of the Upper Colorado River Commission on Tuesday [March 24, 2026].
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
If water levels fall below required levels for hydropower production, dam managers will be forced to release water through bypass tubes, which are not designed for sustained, high-volume flows. With too much use, the bypasses could fail, turning the dam into a massive plug in the river and shutting off downstream flows. To keep Powell above those critical levels, federal officials can either fill it with water from upstream reservoirs, including some in Colorado, or they can reduce the water it drains from Powell and sends to the Lower Basin (California, Arizona and New Mexico). States are already expressing their views on how those operations should work. Upper Colorado River basin states, including Colorado, want the federal government to achieve the conservation requirement by reducing water releases to downstream states, at least in part. Upper Basin states say upstream reservoirs aren’t enough to save Powell without cuts to Lower Basin water deliveries. Draining the upstream reservoirs could also leave the system without backup supplies in the event of another dry year…The three primary reservoirs that could prop up Powell are Flaming Gorge in Wyoming, Navajo Reservoir in New Mexico, and Blue Mesa Reservoir near Gunnison, Colorado. Of the three, only Flaming Gorge is large enough to contribute the entire 1.7 million acre-feet on its own, and that would require draining the reservoir to halfway full. Blue Mesa and Navajo already stand at around halfway full, and the two reservoirs likely could not provide the water to save Lake Powell even if both were entirely drained.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
American White Pelican and Double-crested Cormorant at Bill Williams Wildlife Refuge along the Colorado River, Arizona. Photo: Gary Moore/Audubon Photography Awards
Click the link to read the article on the Audubon website (Jennifer Pitt):
March 20, 2026
Audubon and partners cut through the conflict with a unique, basinwide perspective, championing the river’s health for the people and birds that rely on it.
The winter of 2025-2026 has not been kind to the Colorado River. Record-warm temperatures day after day across the mountains that feed the river have led to record-low snow levels. All indications are that spring snowmelt feeding the river will be scant.
That is a huge problem, because Colorado River reservoirs, which historically held vast water reserves, are already depleted, with Lake Powell at 25% and Lake Mead at 34% of capacity. This is bad news for people and birds relying on water from the Colorado River. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation), the federal agency managing the dams, projects that Lake Powell’s water levels could fall low enough to threaten Glen Canyon Dam’s infrastructure, downstream water delivery, hydropower, and native wildlife in the Grand Canyon including the California Condor and the Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo, among others.
As this crisis plays out, Reclamation has the difficult job of re-tooling systemwide, long-term dam operations on the Colorado River (often referred to as the “Post-2026 Guidelines”). Existing rules, first set nearly two decades ago and tweaked repeatedly to keep up with the declining Colorado River (the result of a warmer and drier climate), expire at the end of this year. As anticipated under this timeline, Reclamation issued a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (Draft EIS) in late January which laid out potential alternatives for federal management and solicited comments from stakeholders. This Draft EIS embraced uncertainty as a central planning condition as they tested different approaches under a broad range of hydrologic conditions. For a long time, the expectation was that the seven U.S. states sharing the river (Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming) would develop a consensus-based proposal for Reclamation, but that hasn’t happened and talk of litigation has increased.
Southwestern Willow flycatcher
Reclamation must now figure out next steps. The agency does have legal authorities, but those legal authorities were crafted long ago and do not necessarily spell out how to take meaningful action in this historic crisis. That threatens the water supply for more than 35 million people including the major cities of the American Southwest, Tribes, millions of acres of irrigated farms and ranches, as well as the Colorado River itself and every living thing that depends on its habitats, including hundreds of bird species like the Southwestern Willow Flycatcher, Yuma Ridgway’s Rail, and Summer Tanager.
This is a graph of snowpack above LakePowell using 104 snow measuring stations. It was 9 inches of water on March 7, now 6 inches. Other dry years shown.There is no historical analog to this — Brad Udall
Audubon submitted formal comments in response to the Draft EIS, joining conservation partners to weigh in on what comes next for Reclamation’s consideration (read our comment letter here). Dozens of comments were submitted by the Colorado River Basin states, water users, and other stakeholders making their case with Reclamation that their water uses need to be protected at the expense of others. In its comments Audubon emphasized the need to stabilize the Colorado River system from its headwaters to its delta—a unique, basinwide perspective that urges Reclamation to manage risks for people and nature rather than deferring hard decisions until emergency conditions force action. Our comment letter focused on constructive engagement noting the Draft EIS’s strengths in its analytical foundation while identifying and describing targeted refinements that would help ensure the Final EIS fully informs decision-makers about risks and real-world consequences. Specifically, Audubon calls for:
Clarity and predictability
Flexible, adaptive tools for conserving, storing, and managing water
Environmental stewardship embedded into operations
Meaningful and voluntary Tribal participation
Pathways for advancing in-basin mitigation and resilience-building opportunities
Pathways for advancingbinational cooperation with Mexico
Over the next few months, Reclamation still has an opportunity to persuade the Colorado River Basin states into consensus. Whether or not they are successful (and we hope they are), sometime this summer we expect Reclamation to issue a Final EIS that includes refinements to the Draft as well as an indication of their preferred alternative for Colorado River operations. In the meantime, it is urgent Reclamation also prepare for the water supply emergency that is unfolding in 2026.
For much of the last century, Reclamation was a leader in developing the southwestern United States by harnessing the Colorado River and delivering its water across the land. Today, Reclamation must lead in a new way, helping everyone and everything that depends on the Colorado River live with the river we have in a warmer, drier world.
Last week’s heat wave was record-smashing, extraordinary, and impossible to ignore. Given that temperatures were more typical of what we’d expect in June, we’ll try not to judge you if you felt the need to turn on your A/C. 🙂
In this blog post, we’ll provide some climate context on last week’s mind-boggling temperatures and touch on the current drought and snowpack situation. And while we’ll focus on the heat from last week here, it’s worth noting that yesterday, March 25, featured yet another round of record-breaking temperatures across Colorado, including new March high temperature records in Denver (87°F) and Grand Junction (88°F).
Widespread, eye-popping warmth
For pretty much all of Colorado, last week brought the warmest March temperatures ever recorded. There were far more stations in the state that broke all-time monthly high records for March than did not. Here’s a look at the records that were set at some of our long-term climate sites:
March maximum temperature records at various long-term weather stations throughout Colorado. Data from ACIS.
From the [table] above, you’ll see that we didn’t just break previous monthly records by a small margin; new records were set by several degrees. It would be noteworthy to have new daily climate records were set by these kinds of margins, but to see monthly records shattered by more than 5°F across numerous stations is truly remarkable.
Another way of looking at this is by comparing the highest temperature observed this March (through the 22nd) to the highest temperature observed in all Marches from 1951—2025 in a gridded temperature dataset (in this case, NOAA’s nClimGrid). Nearly the entire state is red, meaning this March broke the previous record over this time period. (The main exception is at the highest elevations, where it was slightly warmer in March 1987.) Furthermore, most of the state saw temperatures at least 5°F higher than had previously been seen in March. The all-time March record for Colorado of 96°F at Holly in 1907 was not broken, but was tied at numerous locations including La Junta, Burlington, Campo, and Walsh.
Warmest day in March 2026 (through March 22nd) compared to the warmest day in all Marches between 1951-2025. Data from NCEI nclimgrid.
To put an even bigger exclamation point on these incredible records, there were several places in Colorado that not only set new all-time records for March, but they also saw warmer temperatures than their all-time records for April. This includes places like Alamosa (new March record of 83°F; current April record is 80°F) and Fort Collins (new March record of 91°F; current April record is 89°F). Comparing last week’s temperatures to records since 1951, you’ll notice that most of the Front Range Urban Corridor, San Luis Valley, and lower elevations in southeastern Colorado saw warmer temperatures than any March or April day in the past 70+ years:
Same as the previous map, but the warmest March 2026 day is compared to the warmest April days in 1951-2025. Data from NCEI nclimgrid.
As you might expect, the kind of heat that we saw last week across Colorado is more typical of June or even July. In Fort Collins, the reading of 91°F on March 21 marked Fort Collins’s earliest 90°F or warmer day (the previous record was May 5, set back in 2000). On average, Fort Collins doesn’t see its first 90°F or warmer day until June 15:
Dates of first 90°F or warmer day in Fort Collins from 1895-present. The blue dashed line shows the 1991-2020 mean 90°F or warmer day, which is June 9. Data from ACIS.
Last week’s heat was not only remarkable in terms of intensity but also longevity. The most significant heat occurred across four days (March 18-21). Over that period, several locations set new monthly records every one of those days, with each day being warmer than the last. This was a common theme throughout much of the western US:
Number of March 2026 days that set or broke monthly March records. From Brian Brettschneider.
In Colorado, this long-lasting, remarkable heat was far beyond anything we’ve seen in March. Comparing last week’s heat to previous March “heat waves” (defined as days with the warmest 4-day averaged temperatures), it was a step far above the rest. Statewide averaged temperatures during March 18-21, 2026 period were nearly 5°F warmer than Colorado’s 2nd-warmest March heatwave (March 23-26, 2004):
Colorado’s top-25 March heat waves since 1951, defined as 4-day averaged statewide temperatures. Colorado’s warmest heat wave (set last week, March 18-21) eclipsed its previous warmest heat wave (March 23-26, 2004) by nearly 5°F. Data from NCEI nclimgrid.
Snowpack is rapidly declining
One of the most concerning consequences of last week’s is the impact to our snowpack. If you’ve been following along throughout the winter, then you’re well-aware that Colorado has been seeing its worst snowpack in at least 45 years. And the very warm conditions over the past week have exacerbated an already bad situation.
Looking at the statewide water-year-to-date snowpack in the SNOTEL network, it’s clear that snow water equivalent has taken a massive nosedive over the past week or so. On average, Colorado’s peak snowpack date is April 7, meaning that we should still be seeing snowpack accumulate in late March. Instead, averaged over the state, snow water equivalent has declined by over 2.5 inches in the last week. We typically don’t see snowpack melt this quickly until May, so to observe this trend so early in the season is highly concerning.
Statewide snow water equivalent based on the SNOTEL network as of March 28. The black line shows statewide snow water equivalent for Water Year 2026. From NRCS.
Statewide snowpack currently sits at [29%] of the 1991-2020 median. Given the current conditions and forecasts, it’s very possible that many locations have already seen their peak snowpack. Every major river basin in the state is running way-below average, with 71 of the 92 active SNOTEL stations reporting their lowest values on record:
Percent of average (1991-2020) snow water equivalent in Colorado’s major river basins. From NRCS.
In a previous blog post, we discussed that a combination of SNOTEL data (dating back to the 1980s) and manual snow measurements (dating back to the 1930s) have been used to evaluate how this year’s snowpack stacks up against past winters. Throughout much of the winter, the story has been that this year’s snowpack is very bad, but it hasn’t been quite as bad as the winters of 1976-77 and 1980-81. However, with last week’s rapid early season melting, conditions have deteriorated further. We’ll wait for official confirmation from snow course data at the end of the month,but current data suggests that we’re now sitting at Colorado’s worst snowpack on record, surpassing the winters of 1976-77 and 1980-81.
Drought conditions are deteriorating
When discussing the drought landscape, all eyes have been on the major snow deficits in Colorado’s mountain areas, but that isn’t the only part of the state that’s been seeing worsening drought conditions. Most of Colorado’s lower elevations have also seen substantial precipitation deficits in recent months. As such, drought conditions throughout the state have worsened and expanded over the past few months.
Per the latest US Drought Monitor, approximately 91% of the state is experiencing at least abnormally dry conditions, and ~74% of Colorado is experiencing drought (D1 or worse). Those numbers have increased from 54% and 45%, respectively, since the start of the water year on October 1, 2025. The recent warmth brought particularly large changes to the drought monitor last week, as Colorado’s exceptional drought or worse area (D3 or higher) nearly doubled from ~13% last week to ~24% in the latest drought monitor.
Colorado Drought Monitor for March 24, 2026 (left) compared to September 30, 2025 (right).
Consequences from the low snowpack are growing
Impacts from this year’s low snowpack are increasing as governments agencies and industries that rely on it are beginning to respond and plan for additional effects. The expanding drought (in part due to the low snowpack) has prompted the Colorado Governor’s Office to activate the State Drought Task Force for the first time since 2020. Utility departments and water managers have begun to initiate drought response plans and implement water restrictions. And ski areas are planning to close earlier than expected due to poor conditions. Unfortunately, as we anticipate well-below average runoff this spring, impacts will likely expand further.
Colorado Basin River Forecast Center percent of average water supply modeled forecast (issued March 25), showing that widespread, well-below average conditions are expected. From the CBRFC.
The one piece of potential good news that we’ll end this post with is a pattern shift is likely in early April, which is expected to bring precipitation chances to Colorado. While the moisture won’t be nearly enough to make up for the major deficits we’ve seen accumulate over the last several months, I think we can all agree that we’ll take anything we can get.
Western water law must evolve from rigid allocation toward flexible, climate‑smart governance that treats scarcity as the new normal rather than as a temporary emergency. This means rebalancing private rights, public interests, and ecological needs as hydrologic baselines shift.1
First: Prior appropriation’s “first in time, first in right” framework must incorporate stronger rationality and waste limits that reflect hotter, drier conditions, so senior rights cannot indefinitely lock in inefficient or low‑value uses while communities and ecosystems face crisis. Enforcing existing public interest and beneficial use doctrines can gradually reorient supplies toward municipal, tribal, and environmental needs without immediately dismantling the system.2
Second, law must explicitly integrate surface and groundwater, recognizing their physical connectivity and managing them conjunctively rather than independently. This includes permitting and monitoring currently under‑regulated aquifers, tying new pumping to basin‑wide sustainable yield, and curbing withdrawals that quietly undermine river flows and senior rights.3
Third, states need adaptive institutions—water banks, drought reserves, and public or tribal “water trusts”—that can temporarily or permanently acquire rights for critical uses and instream flows. Well‑designed markets and compensated transfers can move water from low‑value irrigation to cities, habitat, and cultural uses while softening political resistance from existing right holders.4
Finally, western water law must better protect ecosystems and vulnerable communities by embedding minimum environmental flows, tribal water security, and rural drinking water reliability into baseline allocation rules, not as afterthoughts. Climate change is making yesterday’s assumptions about snowpack and river yield obsolete, so western water law must become more precautionary, data‑driven, iterative, and able to adjust allocations as science reveals a rapidly changing hydrology.5
An unprecedented heat wave over the past few days has shattered temperature records across Colorado – and may have forced the state’s record-low snowpack to peak weeks ahead of schedule. In a normal year, the state’s snowpack reaches its highest levels in early April, according to data collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. After that, the water stored as mountain snow steadily drains away, with most of it gone by late June or early July. Colorado hasn’t stuck to the script this year. Anyone who’s visited the state’s high country has seen the snowless mountainsides, left bare by a season of warm weather and low precipitation. As of mid-March, the state faced its worst snowpack in the 41-year history of the USDA snow monitoring program, known as SNOTEL. Forecasts don’t predict a significant spring snowstorm within the next few weeks, either. That means as ski slopes and alpine drifts melt into slush, snow levels may have already hit a high-water mark March 9, about a month early.
“That really sets you up poorly for the year to come in terms of water supply,” said Peter Goble, Colorado’s assistant state climatologist at the Colorado Climate Center. “You not only have less water, but you have to stretch it out longer than if the weather had stayed colder longer.”
The early melt also likely offers a preview of Colorado’s hotter future. A 2024 report from the Colorado Climate Center found spring snowpack has shrunk in the past 75 years, but scientists only have modest confidence that the trend will continue. It’s a far better bet that snowpack will peak earlier, creating new challenges for the state’s water managers and its ecosystems…Part of the challenge is when the snow melts sooner, less liquid water makes it into streams and rivers. The dynamic occurs because of the cooler conditions and shorter days in the early spring. When snowpack melts more slowly, it has more time to absorb into the soil and evaporate rather than reaching waterways…Early runoff also lengthens the dry season in the spring and summer, opening the window for wildfires. While vegetation growth, rainfall and other factors play a role in fire risk, early runoff primes mountain landscapes for blazes, Molotch said…The situation has set the table for strict water usage limits in the months ahead. Gov. Jared Polis has activated the Colorado Drought Task Force, shifting the state toward an official drought declaration. Denver Water is also set to implement watering restrictions because of low snowpack starting March 25.
This week, extreme weather events across the United States painted a starkly contrasting picture of drought development and relief. In the West and Plains, a persistent heat dome drove temperatures 20 to 25 degrees above normal, shattering early-season records and significantly increasing evaporative demand. This intense heat, combined with high winds and pre-existing dryness, threatened to rapidly deplete topsoil moisture and fueled explosive, landscape-altering wildfires—most notably the historic Morrill Fire in Nebraska that consumed over 800,000 acres. Ultimately, the combination of soaring temperatures and below-normal precipitation resulted in the expansion of drought and abnormal dryness across portions of the West, Great Plains, and parts of the Southeast.
Conversely, other regions experienced abrupt and volatile moisture influxes that mitigated dry conditions but introduced localized to severe flooding. In the Pacific Northwest, an atmospheric river stalled over Washington, bringing heavy rain and significant snowmelt. Further east, a powerful winter storm delivered a massive precipitation boost in the form of a late-season blizzard, dropping over 50 inches of snow across parts of the Upper Midwest and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The most extreme precipitation of the week occurred over the Hawaiian Islands, where a stalled Kona low dumped unprecedented, historic rainfall, resulting in excessive flooding, widespread landslides, and infrastructure damage. Overall, above-normal precipitation resulted in improvements to drought and abnormal dryness across parts of the Midwest, Northeast, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico…
Intense, unseasonable warmth gripped the High Plains, with temperatures soaring up to 25 degrees F above normal, peaking in parts of Wyoming and Colorado. Precipitation was nearly non-existent, particularly across the southern half of the region. This severe, persistent dryness, coupled with rapidly deteriorating drought indicators, forced widespread expansion and intensification of drought categories. Exceptional drought (D4) expanded in northwest Colorado, while extreme drought (D3) grew across Colorado, southern Wyoming, and southern Nebraska. Severe drought (D2) pushed further into central and northern Wyoming, western and southern Colorado, and advanced from Nebraska into South Dakota. Moderate drought (D1) and abnormal dryness (D0) also expanded broadly across Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas. No drought improvements were made in the High Plains this week…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending March 24, 2026.
Anomalous warmth dominated the West, with nearly the much region seeing temperatures 15 to 25 degrees F above normal. Precipitation was largely absent, save for beneficial moisture in parts of Washington and Montana. This localized precipitation allowed for the reduction of severe drought (D2) in central Montana and abnormal dryness (D0) in western Washington. Elsewhere, the combination of soaring temperatures, lacking precipitation, and declining soil moisture and streamflow data resulted in broad drought degradation. Extreme drought (D3) expanded in southern Idaho, central and northeastern Utah, and northwest New Mexico. Severe drought (D2) increased in coverage across Oregon, southern Idaho, southern Montana, southern and eastern Utah, southern and eastern Arizona, and New Mexico. Finally, abnormal dryness (D0) expanded in eastern Oregon and central and southern California…
Hot and dry conditions dominated the South this week, driving widespread drought degradation. Temperatures soared 5 to 20 degrees F above normal across the vast majority of the region. This heat was coupled with persistent dryness, as month-to-date rainfall deficits grew to 1 to 3 inches below average (representing only 5% to 50% of normal). Deteriorating short- and long-term indicators justified the introduction and expansion of exceptional drought (D4) in southern Texas and northern Arkansas. Extreme drought (D3) was introduced in the Oklahoma Panhandle and expanded across central Oklahoma, northern Arkansas, southern Texas, and Louisiana. Additionally, severe drought (D2) worsened across parts of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee, while moderate drought (D1) and abnormal dryness (D0) expanded in Texas, Mississippi, and southern Louisiana…
Looking Ahead
Over the next five days (March 24–28, 2026), the contiguous United States is forecast to experience another week of widespread, record-breaking warmth. A strong upper-level ridge will dominate the western and central U.S., pushing temperatures 20 to 40 degrees above average. This extreme heat, combined with dry conditions and gusty downsloping winds, will elevate fire weather risks across the High Plains on Tuesday and Wednesday. Meanwhile, a deepening low-pressure system will bring even stronger winds to the Northern Rockies. Concurrently, a potent mid-latitude cyclone will track from the Pacific Northwest toward the Canadian Maritimes. This system will initially drop moderate to heavy rain over the Northwest—potentially triggering isolated flooding—alongside high-elevation snow in the Olympics and Cascades. After weakening over the Central U.S., the system is expected to reinvigorate over the East by late next week, delivering a mix of rain to the south and snow to the north across the Great Lakes, Ohio Valley, and Northeast.
Further out, the Climate Prediction Center’s 6–10 day outlook (valid March 29–April 2, 2026) favors above-normal precipitation across much of the contiguous U.S. and Hawaii. Conversely, below-normal precipitation is favored for most of Alaska and along portions of the East Coast, stretching from southern New England to northern Florida. Probabilities for above-normal temperatures are increased across the vast majority of the lower 48 states and Hawaii, while below-normal temperatures are expected to persist across most of Alaska and much of the Northeast.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending March 24, 2026.
Lake Dillon, a reservoir in Colorado’s Summit County, is owned and managed by Denver Water and supplies water to people living in Metro Denver. It is Denver Water’s largest reservoir and provides about 40% of Metro Denver water. A 23-mile-long trans-basin diversion pipeline, called the Harold D. Roberts Tunnel, carries water from the reservoir under the Continental Divide to Denver. Photo credit: Colorado State University
Each day during the winter and spring, one of the first things I look at is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s website that shows the current status of the snowpack in Colorado’s mountains.
Maybe that sounds like the strange habit of a state climatologist, but I’m far from the only one. Why? Because the snow that falls in our state’s mountains will, when it melts in the spring and summer, become a large portion of the water supply for tens of millions of people.
Those people aren’t only here in Colorado, but are in other states, Tribal nations, and Mexico, drawing their water from the rivers that originate in Colorado. Mountain snow is essential for our winter recreation industry, for farms and ranches that grow our food, for drinking water, for ecosystem health, and much more.
It hasn’t been a pretty sight when I have opened that USDA website each morning this winter. In an average year, our mountains get a lot of snow: In places like the Park Range, the West Elk Mountains or the San Juans, a typical year brings hundreds of inches of snow, carrying more than 40 inches of liquid water. This year, we struggled to get half that. Now, after an unprecedented heat wave in March, the snow is already disappearing quickly.
Figure 1: Map of annual average precipitation over 1991-2020 in Colorado, with color scale matching the colors in the state flag. Data from the PRISM Climate Group. Credit: Colorado Climate Center
As of March 25, averaged across 115 stations in Colorado’s mountains, the snow water equivalent was just 38% of the 1991-2020 average. (The snow water equivalent is the amount of water stored in the snowpack.) This represents the lowest snowpack in more than 40 years – and possibly ever – in Colorado’s mountains. Conditions haven’t been any better along the Front Range and Eastern Plains, which have also lagged far behind the average amount of snowfall.
Figure 2: Statewide snow water equivalent from the SNOTEL network, as of March 25, 2026. The median over 1991-2020 is shown with the green line, the historical range is shown from red (low) to blue (high), and this year is shown in the black line. From USDA/NRCS.
There have been other major snow droughts in the past, notably the winters of 1976-1977 and 1980-1981, that threatened the ski industry and resulted in record-low streamflow on some of Colorado’s rivers. But this snow season has been unrivaled in its warmth. The first five months of the water year – from October through February – were Colorado’s warmest on record by a large margin. And it’s almost certain that we are in the midst of the warmest March on record as well.
The warmth has been remarkably persistent, as relentless ridges of high pressure have prevented the usual snowstorms from moving into the state. The Fort Collins weather station at Colorado State University recorded an astonishing 43 days with a high temperature of 60°F or above during climatological winter (December through February). The previous record, from records dating back to the late 19th century, was 22. Starting March 18, Fort Collins had temperatures higher than had ever been observed in March, four days in a row. This was capped by a high of 91°F on March 21; there had never previously been a 90-degree day in Fort Collins before May.
Figure 3: Number of winter days with high temperatures of 60°F or above at the official Fort Collins weather station on the CSU campus. Winter 2025-2026 had 43 days, far more than the previous record of 22 in 1980-1981. Credit: Colorado Climate Center
Records for March were smashed across the state and the western U.S., at both low and high elevations. One thing we do as state climatologists is put current conditions into historical context, as usually with some investigation, it’s possible to find a past analog to what we’re experiencing now. But the intense and prolonged heat has been unlike anything previously observed in March.
This, of course, is occurring in the context of a long-term trend toward warmer conditions, both globally and locally, largely attributable to increases in greenhouse gases. Per data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, nine of the 11 warmest years in Colorado records have occurred since 2012, and Colorado has now warmed by 3°F since the 1890s. Droughts come and go, and they have always been a challenge in Colorado and the West. But warming is making them more likely and more intense. In other words, climate change is water change.
When above-average temperatures and precipitation deficits stack up over the course of months, we start to see drought conditions develop or worsen. The impacts of drought are wide-ranging and include economic and agricultural repercussions. Farmers and ranchers may face lower crop yields and higher costs of feeding livestock. A snow drought like this winter’s can reduce outdoor recreation opportunities and hurt the state’s tourism industry. Drought years also tend to be years with more and larger wildfires.
Drought impacts can be felt a long distance from where the precipitation deficits occur. For example, southeastern Colorado received decent precipitation this winter, but low snow in the mountains hundreds of miles away near Leadville means less water on the Arkansas River, an important source for farmers in southeastern Colorado.
As each winter progresses, even if the mountain snowpack isn’t looking great, we can always look ahead to March and April as the time when big storms are possible and the deficits can be made up. Unfortunately, this year has been just the opposite: Instead of much-needed snowstorms, we’re in an unprecedented March heat wave that is accelerating the melting of what little snow is there. The chances of getting back into the range of average have dwindled away, and if the weather pattern doesn’t turn around in April, we may be headed for uncharted territory for Colorado water.
The snow drought was evident in Park City, Utah, on Feb. 9, 2026. This golf course is normally used for cross-country skiing in winter. Mario Tama/Getty Images
Across much of the Western United States, winter 2026 was the year the snow never came. Many ski resorts got by with snowmaking but shut down their winter operations early. Fire officials and water supply managers are worried about summer.
Where I live in Boise, Idaho, temperatures hit the low 80s Fahrenheit (high-20s Celsius) in mid-March. The same heat dome sent temperatures soaring to 105 F (40 C) in Phoenix.
Ordinarily, water managers and hydrologists like me who study the Western U.S. expect the mountain snowpacks to be at their fullest around April 1. Snowpacks are natural reservoirs of water that farms and communities depend on through the hot, dry summer. Their snow water equivalent, meaning the amount of liquid water in the snowpack, is seen as a bellwether for water supplies.
But the 2026 water year has been anything but ordinary. In fact, its snow drought has few historical analogs.
Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service shows that out of approximately 70 river basins across the Western U.S., only five are at or above the 1991-2020 median snow water equivalent for this time of year. Most of those are clustered around the Yellowstone region of western Wyoming and eastern Idaho.
By contrast, 11 basins have less than 25% of the 1991-2020 median, and more than half are below 50%. The headwaters of critically important rivers, including the Colorado, the Columbia and the Missouri, are peppered with basins that are far below historical averages.
Just because the Western U.S. is in a snow drought doesn’t mean it isn’t getting precipitation. Temperatures have been high enough since the start of the water year in October that a lot of what normally would have fallen as snow fell as rain instead.
The West experienced a very warm December at all but the highest elevations, but strong storms also drenched large parts of the region. Washington state was swamped with rain that triggered flooding and melted the existing snowpack.
The total area of the Western U.S. with snow cover has been exceptionally low compared to the years 2001 to 2025. National Snow and Ice Data Center
Temperatures in January were less extreme but still warmer than historical averages. However, precipitation in January was far below the 1991-2020 average throughout much of the region. February brought precipitation conditions closer to historical averages, but temperatures were much warmer than normal.
The Western U.S., therefore, got a triple whammy: Two of the three critical snow-accumulation months were too warm, and the third was too dry.
Water worries ahead
So what does this mean for water supplies and river flows?
Water managers in Wyoming and Washington are already signaling that some water rights holders – cities, irrigation districts, individual farms and industries can take limited amounts of water from rivers, canals and aquifers – can expect to receive less than their full allotment of water in 2026. It’s not unreasonable to expect other states to soon follow suit.
Throughout the Western U.S., water rights are administered according to the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation – those who hold the oldest legitimate claims to water from a river, reservoir or aquifer are entitled to receive their allotments first.
Junior water rights holders who may be at risk of receiving less than their full allotment of water likely have difficult decisions ahead related to the planting and management of their crops. The challenges are compounded by the likelihood of increases in fertilizer and transportation costs associated with the ongoing war in Iran.
Another big concern is whether the historic snow drought is setting up the West for a bad fire season. That’s still an open question.
Rain has meant moisture is available now for plants to grow, but the lack of snowpack that normally keeps meltwater flowing through summer raises concerns about whether those plants will dry out, leaving them ready to burn.
Fire is a historically important feature of the forest and rangeland ecosystems of the West, and these ecosystems are to some degree adapted to large swings in conditions from year to year and season to season.
Because precipitation across much of the West is close to historical averages, there is snow in some of the highest-elevation mountains. And at lower elevations, some of the precipitation that fell as rain likely remains in the soils.
Snowmaking kept slopes skiable amid high temperatures in March 2026 in Breckenridge, Colo., but it wasn’t hard to find dry, exposed land nearby. Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images
Weather conditions in the late spring and summer – how much rain falls and how hot and dry conditions become – will play critical roles in determining the shape forests and rangelands will be in for fire season.
What this winter suggests about the future
The record-low snowpack may be a harbinger of what a warmer future will look like in the region. Many researchers have investigated how climate change will influence snowpacks and water supply throughout the Western U.S., but questions and critical challenges remain.
At a young age, Charlotte Madin of Oahu, Hawaii, saw the impacts of climate change firsthand, including wildfires that rained ash from the sky, and destruction to the beautiful coral reefs near her home.
Madin: “Seeing that happen in real time in front of me was really scary for me.”
Four years ago, as a young teenager, Charlotte and 12 other young people sued Hawaii’s Department of Transportation. They said the agency was not doing enough to cut climate pollution and protect children’s futures.
Charlotte testified in a deposition.
Madin: “It was very intimidating. I remember being really, really nervous for the days leading up to the deposition.”
But she says her efforts were worth it.
As part of a landmark settlement, the Department of Transportation agreed to create plans to decarbonize the transportation sector by 2045.
Madin: “And it was just so incredible to hear that all of our hard work … had paid off.”
Now in 11th grade, Charlotte serves on a youth council created by the settlement to advise on transportation planning.
So she’s still speaking up for a healthy climate – and wants other young people to know they can, too.
Madin: “Utilizing the power of democracy and utilizing the legal system, you can do big things with your voice.”
Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy / ChavoBart Digital Media
Figure 1. Forested regions across western contiguous US with ⩾20 mm maximum snow water equivalent (SWEmax) over the 1985–2021 study period. Pixels are color-coded according to their respective Hydrologic Unit Code Level 2 (HUC2) regions. Solid black lines delineate extents of HUC2 regions, while dotted white lines denote state boundaries.
Click the link to access the research letter on the IOP Science website (Jared A. Balik, Jonathan D. Coop, and Sean A. Parks). Here’s the abstract:
Climate change is reducing winter snowpack and advancing spring snowmelt across the western United States, interacting with El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) teleconnections that drive spatially predictable interannual fluctuations that contribute to high- or low-snow winters. Early snowmelt extends the fire season, enhancing opportunities for ignition and increasing fuel dryness, both of which contribute to greater burned areas. However, relationships between snowpack on burn severity, a measure of forest loss and expected biogeochemical and hydrological impacts of fire, have not been examined. Here, using remotely sensed snow and fire data spanning 1985–2021, we examined how snowpack quantity and timing of spring snowmelt influence annual area burned and burn severity at the watershed scale. Early snowmelt was associated with earlier occurrences of fire ⩾400 ha and greater annual area burned, whereas low snowpack water content was associated with more severe burn outcomes including greater mean composite burn index (CBI) and larger proportions of high severity fire (CBI ⩾ 2.25). Thus, low-snow winters with early snowmelt may prime forested watersheds to dry, burn, and experience high severity fire. These outcomes are consistent with enhanced fuel dry-down: early snowmelt extends the dry-down window while low snowpack quantity portends greater fuel aridity during the dry period. Our findings also highlight how the ENSO interacts with directional warming: El Niño phases amplify trends of snowpack loss and increasing area burned severely in northwestern watersheds but dampen these trends in southwestern watersheds, while La Niña phases exert the opposite effect. Projected warming, potentially accompanied by greater ENSO variability and extremes, points toward a future of reduced snowpack, earlier snowmelt, and increased area burned at high severity in forests where snowpack historically buffered fire risk, with attendant losses in forest carbon storage and disrupted hydrological function of forested watersheds.
The San Juan River near Navajo Dam, New Mexico, Aug. 23, 2015. Photo credit: Phil Slattery Wikimedia Commons
From email from Reclamation:
March 20, 2026
Reclamation conducts Public Operations Meetings three times per year to gather input for determining upcoming operations for Navajo Reservoir. Input from individuals, organizations, and agencies along with other factors such as weather, water rights, endangered species requirements, flood control, hydro power, recreation, fish and wildlife management, and reservoir levels, will be considered in the development of these reservoir operation plans. In addition, the meetings are used to coordinate activities and exchange information among agencies, water users, and other interested parties concerning the San Juan River and Navajo Reservoir. The next meeting will be held virtually on April 21st
While it looks like a dusty, silver-gray desert shrub, guayule – which originated in Northern Mexico, is essentially a “living rubber factory. As of 2026 the plant gaining serious traction as a potential savior for farmers in the American Southwest—particularly in Arizona and California—who are facing catastrophic cut to their use of Colorado River water.1
Why Guayule may be a “Rescue” Crop
Farmers in the West are in a bind: water intensive crops like alfalfa, corn, and cotton are becoming nearly impossible to grow with dwindling water allotments. Guayule is stepping into that gap for several reasons:
Extreme Water Efficiency: Guayule uses roughly 50% less water than cotton or alfalfa. In Pinal County, Arizona, it’s estimated that switching to guayule could save 15% of the total agricultural water usage.2
Heat & Salt Tolerance: It doesn’t just survive the desert heat; it thrives in it. It can also handle the high-salinity soil that often plagues fields where irrigation water has evaporated over decades.
Domestic Rubber Security: Currently, almost all the world’s natural rubber comes from Hevea trees in Southeast Asia. Guayule provides a domestic, “Made in the USA” source of rubber for tires and medical supplies.3
Hypoallergenic Latex: Unlike traditional rubber, guayule latex lacks the proteins that cause “Type I” latex allergies, making it a premium material for surgical gloves.
The “Catch”
The hurdle isn’t growing the guayule; it’s the infrastructure. Farmers can’t switch overnight because they need specialized processing plants to extract the rubber from the shrub’s bark. However, companies like Bridgestone have been scaling up commercial-grade tire production using guayule, signaling that the supply chain is finally catching up to the climate reality.4
Other Resilient Contenders
While Guayule is the heavy hitter for the Southwest, a few other “underreported” crops are being trialed to rescue Western and Plains farmers in 2026:
Kernza: A perennial grain with 10-foot-deep roots. It doesn’t need to be replanted every year, preventing soil erosion and sequestering massive amounts of carbon.
Teff: An ancient Ethiopian grain that is highly drought-tolerant and serves as a high-value, water-wise forage for horses and livestock.
Amaranth: A “pseudo-cereal” that requires very little water and produces highly nutritious seeds and leaves, often used in health-food markets.
Hemp: Industrial hemp requires significantly less water per kilogram than cotton and other crops. So it can flourish with less irrigation, making it ideal for regions with scarce water resources. Hemp’s deep roots improve soil structure, which aids in water retention and prevents soil erosion and its cultivation helps to minimize agricultural runoff.
With cooler weather finally in sight following a mid-March heat wave, Colorado’s snowpack is reporting an early meltdown
Several Western Slope mountain towns experienced record-breaking temperatures last week, with some towns logging the hottest day on record in up to 65 years. On average, most towns recorded temperatures between 20-30 degrees above normal, according to National Weather Service Meteorologist Brianna Bealo…Recent warm temperatures have meant early closures for some mountain resorts. Ski Cooper, Powderhorn Mountain and Sunlight Mountain resorts all closed for the season on March 22, with other resorts limiting terrain due to little natural snow. Other areas didn’t open at all, including Cranor Ski Area in Gunnison, Lee’s Ski Hill in Ouray and the Hesperus Ski Area. The addition of another week of warmer temperatures spells bad news for Colorado’s rapidly dwindling snowpack. As of March 23, snow water equivalent in Colorado is at 44% of median with 16 days left to go until the median peak. The snowpack’s state will likely only get worse throughout the week thanks to the warm and dry weather. Historically, the state’s snowpack reaches its peak in early April before the mountain snow drains away by June or July. A warm winter compared with early snowmelt, however, means the snowpack likely already reached its peak around March 10, Bealo said, and could melt out earlier in the spring.
“It looks like we’ve already reached peak, and we’re melting out pretty rapidly,” Bealo said. “Even though we’ve only really just started seeing melt-out occurring, if we continue at the same rate that we’re seeing, we’d probably be melted out somewhere towards the end of April, early May.”
The sun rises over Lake Powell in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, in Page, Arizona. Lake Powell, a critical Colorado River reservoir, is only at a third of its capacity as drought conditions in the Southwest worsen. CREDIT: ECOFLIGHT
Click the link to read the article on the AZMirror website (Caitlin Sievers):
March 23, 2026
Arizona is preparing for a legal battle over its rights to Colorado River water.
Following an extraordinarily dry winter along the river basin and what’s expected to be an exceptionally hot and dry spring across the West, where high temperatures in March have already blown past records, the pressure to maintain access to the state’s fair share of river water is growing.
The Colorado River is a vital source of drinking water for 40 million people in the seven basin states, Mexico and 30 Native American tribes, and provides water for farming operations and hydroelectricity.
Reaching a water usage agreement is imperative to the basin states as the river’s water supply continues to decline, as it has done for the past 25 years due to a persistent drought spurred on by climate change.
On Monday, the Arizona Governor’s Office announced that it had retained the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to represent the state in possible litigation among the Colorado River Basin states and the federal government.
Sullivan & Cromwell is an international firm based in New York City that has represented big names like Microsoft, BP, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase. The state is using some of the $3 million it put into its Colorado River legal defense fund last year to retain the law firm.
The Governor’s Office doesn’t expect to take any legal action until June at the earliest, but wants to be prepared for the possibility, especially if the dispute ends up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Lower Basin states — Arizona, Nevada and California — and the Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — have been negotiating an updated water usage agreement for more than two years.
But so far the states have blown past two deadlines to do so — one in November and one in February — and are quickly approaching October, when the existing usage agreement expires.
If the states can’t reach an agreement before that, the federal government will implement one of its draft plans, all of which would place an outsized burden on the Grand Canyon State.
That’s because the Central Arizona Project, a series of canals that supplies Colorado River water to the Valley and the Tucson area, is one of the newest users of the river water, making it legally one of the first to be cut.
But so far, the Upper Basin states have refused to agree to any water usage cuts of their own, while the Lower Basin states insist that every state take their fair share.
Arizona has offered to reduce its Colorado River allocation by 27%, California by 10%, and Nevada by nearly 17%.
Negotiators for Arizona also insist that the Upper Basin states be held to the original 1922 Colorado River Compact that requires them to release a 10-year rolling average of at least 75 million acre-feet of water to the Lower Basin, in addition to one-half of the annual allotment owed to Mexico, for a total of about 80.2 million acre-feet.
An acre-foot of water represents enough to cover an acre of land to a depth of one foot, or about 325,851 gallons. That’s enough to provide three homes in Arizona a year of water, on average.
So far, the Upper Basin states have held to the original release agreement. But as water levels in the two major reservoirs on the river, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, continue to decline, it’s expected that the Upper Basin states will be unable to meet that requirement as early as 2027.
When the states entered into the original Colorado River Compact in 1922, they allocated 7.5 million acre-feet of water each year to be shared by the Upper Basin states and another 7.5 million to be used among the Lower Basin states.
Since then, the states have updated their water usage guidelines several times, even though the apportionments remain the same. But Lower Basin states face mandatory cuts during times of drought and Upper Basin states do not. In 2025, for the fifth year in a row, the federal government imposed drought-based cuts, and Arizona’s amounted to a loss of 512,000 acre-feet of water for the year.
Under current allocations, Arizona has rights to 2.8 million acre feet of water per year, and has implemented 800,000 acre feet in reductions per year. In contrast, Colorado has rights to 3.8 million acre feet a year, although it uses an average of 1.9 million acre feet, annually.
The amount of water that Colorado has access to can be unpredictable because it relies mostly on melted snowpack for its water, which varies from year to year. This year’s snowpack levels are historically low.
The Lower Basin states have undertaken significant conservation efforts for Colorado River water since 2014 and have reduced their consumption from 7.4 million acre-feet in 2015 to just over 6 million in 2024.
The Upper Basin states have increased their usage in the past five years, from 3.9 million acre-feet in 2021 to 4.4 million in 2024. The federal government’s draft plans allow for the Upper Basin states to use even more water.
Gov. Katie Hobbs’s proposed budget for this year would put another $1 million toward the Colorado River Legal Defense fund, and lawmakers earlier this month gave preliminary approval to doing just that.
Even as Arizona prepares for a legal battle, the state plans to continue attempting to reach an agreement with the other river basin states, according to the Governor’s Office.
“Governor Hobbs is committed to working with the federal government and other Colorado River states to deliver a negotiated settlement that protects Arizona’s fair share of water and stabilizes the system,” spokesman for Hobbs Christian Slater said. “However, it’s critical that Arizona be prepared to defend ourselves in court if an agreement cannot be reached or the Law of the River is violated.”
Water stored in Colorado’s Denver Basin aquifers, which extend from Greeley to Colorado Springs, and from Golden to the Eastern Plains near Limon, does not naturally recharge from rain and snow and is therefore carefully regulated. Courtesy U.S. Geological Survey.
Water providers across Douglas County urge conservation this irrigation season
Three water providers in Douglas County are urging residents to conserve as irrigation season approaches. Following a warm, dry winter and below-average snowpack across Colorado, Castle Rock Water,… pic.twitter.com/b6pje2sx8L
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
March 18, 2026
Some notes on the current state of the Colorado River…
I’m preparing for a panel discussion this evening in Albuquerque. I promised – three-finger promise, Scout’s honor, which still means something to me – that I wouldn’t use any swear words., either in the blog post or the panel discussion.
The state of the water
Per the latest numbers from my colleague/collaborator/friend Jack Schmidt, Lake Powell currently holds 1.57 million acre feet of water above the protect-the-infrastructure no-go line of elevation 3,500.
Storage at this point in the year is similar to 2022, when we began a hair-about-to-be-on-fire drill as Interior raced to figure out how to protect Glen Canyon Dam because of newly understood (or newly publicly understood) risks of dropping below minimum power pool and using the dam’s outlook works. That constraint still holds.
The forecast this year is a catastrophe compared to 2022: 1.75 million acre feet for the 2026 runoff season, compared to 3.8 maf in the 2022 runoff season. [ed. emphasis mine]
The result, according to the most probable forecast from Reclamation, is that absent some sort of action (see governance below) Powell will drop below 3,500 in September, and stay that way until the spring runoff in 2027.
According to the min probable forecast, which is realistic given the looming heat-pocalypse, we hit 3,500 by July and stay there forever (by which I mean as far as the current 24-month forecast runs – as the late Jim Morison wrote, the future’s uncertain and the end is always near).
The state of the governance
The state of the governance nests two separate by closely linked problems: near term actions and long term rules.
Near term actions
Protecting Glen Canyon Dam from that 3,500 no-go line requires coming up with a least 2 million acre feet of water over the next two years – to get us past that spring 2027 problem described above. There are two ways to do this. The first is to release a bunch of water from upstream, primarily Flaming Gorge Reservoir. How much? Dunno. The second is to cut releases from Glen Canyon Dam, reducing flows through the Grand Canyon and into Lake Mead. How much? Dunno, though we may find out soon.
The current rules, adopted in response to the challenges of 2022-23, allows releases from Glen Canyon Dam to drop this year to 6 million acre feet, which effectively gets 1.5 million of the needed 2 million feet from Lake Mead by reducing releases thereto. Another 500,000 in releases from upstream reservoir gets you 2 million acre feet, with room to do more if the hydrology gets even worse – which it might.
Longer term actions
The longer term stuff is where, as a student of governance, this gets really interesting for me. As a citizen of the basin, I am inclined to swear words at the dysfunction that has left us with no long term plan beyond the end of this year. But I Scout’s honor promised, so shifting to the “student of governance” schtick gives me a view from nowhereway to approach this dispassionately, without the, y’know, words that would have made Mr. Vinatieri, my Scoutmaster, disappointed in me.
Others have chronicled the failure of the seven U.S. Colorado River Basin states to come to a consensus agreement on a set of river operating rules, we need not repeat that here, other than to note that what we have here is a classic case of what has been called the tragedy of the anticommons. This is a situation where many people or entities – in this case the states of the Colorado River Basin – each have the power to block a solution that might be to the benefit of the community as a whole. In this case, each of the seven states of the Colorado River Basin have blocking power over solutions that would prevent the reservoirs from crashing.
See above: the reservoirs are crashing and we have no plan to prevent it because any proposal that might prevent it has been blocked by one or more states that object.
The reason behind this is a set of rules written beginning in the 1920s governing the river – the Colorado River Compact and a series of ad hoc additions that followed – that attempted to lay out rules for managing the river but failed to include functional processes for modifying the rules when they proved inadequate to changing the situation. We’re now stuck with a system under which each of the seven basin states has blocking power over any attempt to change the rules.
This violates one of the fundamental institutional design principles identified by the late Elinor Ostrom, who taught us so much about how we succeed or fail in overcoming the tragedy of the commons: “How will the rules … be changed over time with changes in the performance of the resource system, the strategies of participants, and external opportunities and constraints?” We have to have rules about how we rewrite the rules. We lack that.
Despite this, we have succeeded in the past, in a series of rule-writing exercises that began in the late 1990s, by depending on principled actors at the state level recognizing that they needed to balance their need to protect their own community’s water supplies against the need to solve problems at the scale of the basin as a whole.
My personal values on this question are both instrumental (things that I think are in the best interests of myself and my community) and deontological (things that I think are fundamental moral principles). The second first: I think we have ethical obligations to those upstream and downstream of us in shared river basins. This is, for me, fundamental. The second is instrumental – I think compromise is in the best interests of my community’s water supply and therefore its future, because if we end up in litigation and the system crashes, we stand to lose a lot more than if we compromise, are willing to act on our obligations to our downstream neighbors by using less ourselves.
The last two years of increasingly hostile negotiations among the states make clear that behavior that recognizes those principles is gone, replaced by interpersonal bickering and a game of chicken driving the basin toward litigation (effectively hoping to manage the basin by convincing a judge of our preferred interpretation of ambiguous rules written a century ago) and reservoir collapse.
Thar be dragons.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
The dimensions of batteries was demonstrated during the public unveiling of a project for Holy Cross Energy near Glenwood Springs and Carbondale in late 2022. Those particularly batteries did not work out as expected and are being replaced, although two later battery projects in the Hoiy Cross service territory along Interstate 70 west of Glenwood Springs were immediately successful. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
March 19, 2026
Utilities are rapidly integrating energy storage places from Durango to a tiny place near the Nebraska border now best known for storing grain
Amherst lies in northeastern Colorado, about seven miles from the Nebraska border. It has a gas station, a Lutheran church, and a population of 58. Dozens of grain silos, each 110 feet tall, loom over the community. Together, they can store 2.7 million bushels, mostly wheat and corn.
In about a year, Amherst will also be storing electricity. Highline Electric, a cooperative based in nearby Holyoke, plans to install lithium-iron batteries with two megawatts of storage.
Dennis Herman, the general manager of Highline, explained that the battery storage will enable Highline to lower its peak demands for electricity, primarily in late afternoon to early evening hours. This will save money for Highline and its wholesale provider, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association. Like most everything, electricity typically costs most when in highest demand.
Battery storage is becoming commonplace in Colorado’s energy landscape. Utilities large and small are embracing lithium-iron batteries as prices have continued to plunge.
Xcel Energy by the end of March will have 200 MW of battery storage available. The company expects to have 1,725 MW of capacity by 2028. Tri-State, Colorado’s second largest electrical generator, plans 550 MW in Colorado and another 150 in New Mexico.
Batteries represent a crucial step in the decarbonization of our energy. Fuel agnostic, they can store electricity generated by natural gas or even coal plants. Most commonly they are paired with renewable energy, particularly solar. Utilities with large-scale batteries can stock up on cheap energy to meet hours of peak demand, as in the case at Amherst.
“As we move to a much higher percentage of renewables on the grid, storage takes on a role that is more and more important,” said Will Toor, director of the Colorado Energy Office. “When you think about how we will keep the lights on in the future in a grid with high amounts of renewables, storage just gets more and more important.”
Batteries can also serve other purposes. For example, they can provide electricity in areas of the distribution grid with potential weaknesses, such as places that will lose power if a power line goes down.
Robin Lunt likens the role batteries are playing in energy to that of refrigeration in food supply chains.
“You can move lettuce from California to the Midwest if you have refrigeration. And if you don’t, you’re just betting on the weather,” said Lunt, chief commercial officer for Denver-based Guzman Energy. “Storage is a new tool that smooths out the volatility that currently exists with energy.”
Taking a national perspective, Dennis Wamsted, an analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, sees the “blistering pace of the buildout of solar and battery storage” continuing for at least the next two years. “This allows renewables to gain more market share from coal and gas in U.S. power markets.,” he said in a new report he co-authored.
“Battery storage is about to change how the utility industry operates, and it will be for the better,” he said.
Sharp declines in prices have been crucial in spurring rapid deployment of utility-scale four-hour lithium-batteries. Bloomberg NEF, a research organization, reported that costs in 2025 fell more than 27% even as other clean energy costs rose. Taking a longer view, Energy Storage News in December reported that battery costs during the prior decade fell an average 20% annually even as installations rose 80% annually. Solar recorded parallel cost declines.
Lazard, a global assessment management firm, in 2025 found the sharp price declines were driven by technology advances, including increased cell capacity and energy density. An oversupply of battery cells resulting from lower-than-expected demand for EVs also contributed to the reduced prices.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by President Donald Trump in 2025 gutted many elements of the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2023. Tax credits for battery storage were largely spared and benefit Highline and other not-for-profit electric cooperatives.
First utility scale in 2012
Batteries have stored electricity since Thomas Edison was tinkering in his New Jersey laboratories a century ago. Only in 2012, however, was the first utility-scale application battery storage project implemented in the United States. That was a pilot project in Oregon.
Colorado’s era of utility-scale battery storage began service in November 2018. Brighton-based United Power, an electric cooperative serving a broad arc along metropolitan Denver’s northern fringe, wanted to begin understanding how batteries fit into the puzzle of the energy future.
“Understanding storage is the next logical step in the progression of renewable generation,” said Jerry Marizza in 2018 when announcing the batteries. He was then United Power’s new business director. “Without the ability to store energy, renewables will have an artificial cap placed on their utilization.”
Marizza, who now lives in Arizona, remembers utilities resisting batteries as they had also once resisted solar. Many were blind-sided when prices tumbled. “They just didn’t want to learn about this stuff because they didn’t see any value in doing it,” he said.
“To me, it was a no-brainer,” said Marizza. “We didn’t do it because we wanted to become Renewables USA, although that was a benefit. We did it because it made business sense.”
United Power has rapidly deployed lithium-ion battery storage systems in its service territory north of metropolitan Denver. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
The payback on investments has declined to six or eight years. Payback on an electrical substation – crucial to delivering electricity — is 50 years.
In some situations, the payback can be far quicker. In 2024, United added 120 megawatts. Those batteries paid for themselves almost immediately by avoiding the need to buy electricity from other sources during times of high summer temperatures. That saved the cooperative $300,000 a month. Plus, cheap solar can be used to recharge the batteries, further saving money.
United’s first experiment at the cooperative’s office along Interstate 25 between Longmont and Firestone now looks humble. The Tesla four-megawatt batteries sit behind chain link fences and within an enclosure little larger than a typical suburban two-car garage.
One measure of batteries — the one used mostly in this story — is in simple megawatts. A different measure, megawatt-hours, defines how much electric energy can be delivered from a battery over time. United’s 4 MW of storage, for example, has 16 MW-hours. The 2 MW batteries at Amherst will have 8 MW-hours (also called MWh).
Think of megawatts being the water sitting in a jug and megawatt-hours being the time it takes to empty the jug.
United’s small 4-MW experiment from 2018 was slow to be surpassed. Finally, in 2023, Holy Cross Energy began using 5 MW batteries (15 MWh) coupled with 13,500 solar panels at the Colorado Mountain College Spring Valley Campus above Carbondale. Soon after, Xcel began use of far larger battery arrays.
Tri-State is a case study in this altered thinking. Twenty years ago it saw a future consisting almost entirely of coal. By 2018 it had abandoned those ambitions but still discouraged United’s battery experiment. At that time it provided wholesale power to United. Now, Tri-State is working with 10 of its member cooperatives, including Highline, most of them in Colorado, in exploring utility-scale batteries as part of Tri-State’s demand-response program.
“The overall goal of this Tri-State program is to introduce flexibility to electric system loads, which is becoming more necessary as the generating assets being built today are not dispatchable in the traditional sense,” explained Highline’s Herman.
A striking example of the growing and valuable role of batteries can be found in California. In a December 2025 New York Times story, Ivan Penn pointed out that California officials had often asked residents in recent years to use less electricity on hot summer days to prevent power outages. Those alerts ceased after 2022, he wrote, largely because batteries have allowed California to use its abundant solar power well into evening hours.
California’s battery capacity, 14,583 MW, dwarfed Colorado’s 459 MW as of January, according to Clearview, a data-tracking company dedicated to the clean energy transition. Colorado, though, has had a far more rapid rate of growth. It had gained 102 times as much battery capacity by 2025 as compared to the 30-fold increase in California.
Texas, a politically red state, had an adoption rate that dwarfed those of bluish California and mostly blue Colorado: 4,100% since 2020. Batteries are apolitical.
A game changer
Mark Gabriel calls batteries a game changer. He is the chief executive of United Power. The electrical cooperative has nearly 120,000 members. They include data centers, oil-and-gas operators, and expansive suburban neighborhoods. United’s 6% annual growth in demand ranks highest of all Colorado electrical utilities.
How can that demand be satisfied? Wind generation remains the least expensive energy but requires transmission from mostly distant locations. That transmission is costly and typically takes a decade or more to build, Gabriel points out. Renting space on transmission lines is like driving in the toll lane of a highway.
Gas is another option, and United managed to get its natural gas plant near Keenesburg on line in July 2025 after being commissioned just 20 months earlier. The same plant might take three to five years now because of constricted supply lines.
Batteries have tightened supply chains, too, and somewhat heightened prices of late. But they can be installed within 10 months. Too, they can use existing infrastructure. In other words, no new transmission lines needed.
Substations are commonly located in areas where demand for electricity is congregated. “It’s in the distribution system that the batteries have real value,” said Gabriel.
Siting can be a challenge in areas where land is already at a premium. They do take up space, if far less than solar farms. Visually, though, they are boring, small monoliths 8 to 10 feet tall, erected in rows.
United today has 119.5 MW of battery capacity, second in Colorado only to Xcel’s existing 200 MW. Both utilities plan far more.
United Power’s first foray into battery storage was in an area little bigger than a suburban garage behind its office along Interstate 25 between Firestone and Longmont. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
United plans 200 megawatt batteries more by 2027 in a project south of Brush called Fortress that will be coupled with 200 MW of solar. That 319.5 MW of battery storage will, if necessary, enable United to meet 40% to 50% of demand.
Xcel Energy is also rapidly expanding its battery capacity. This year it expects to complete two 200-MW battery installations, one near Brush and the second in South Park. In addition, Xcel is contracted to buy capacity from others through power purchase agreements n Adams County and Pueblo County and perhaps elsewhere.
The company is also seeking approval from state regulators to add 400 MW of battery storage adjacent to its Hayden coal plant.
Batteries are also making inroads in homes and businesses. Two electrical cooperatives, Glenwood Springs-based Holy Cross Energy and Fort Collins-based Poudre Valley Electric, have incentives for home batteries, as does Xcel Energy.
Higher prices for these small-scale applications have so far discouraged broad adoption. Multi-day outages during the last year resulting from high-wind events along the foothills west of Boulder and Denver are also spurring purchases for home use.
Microgrids are also becoming more common. At Red Feather Lake, northwest of Fort Collins, 140-kilowatt (446-kilowatt-hour) Tesla Powerpack batteries are coupled with solar and propane generation.
This microgrid is meant to provide power for fire, emergency medical services, and other critical community functions in case Red Feather Lake is cut off from the outside world, as nearly happened during the Cameron Peak Fire in 2021. As was, the fire forced evacuation of the community.
Aspen had a close call in 2018 when it came within one burning electric pole of losing power during the Lake Christine Wildfire. Now, it has a small microgrid for emergency services. So does a hospital at Cortez, among others.
In Durango, La Plata Electric was awarded a state grant for a microgrid at the Mountain Middle School. The electrical cooperative would add battery storage to couple with existing rooftop solar to allow the school to become a haven in case of extended power outages.
A setback because of setbacks
Batteries have occasionally posed problems. Batteries installed for Holy Cross Energy above Glenwood Springs in 2022 underperformed. The manufacturer, Powin, has gone bankrupt, and those batteries are now being replaced with a new Tesla utility-scale battery system. Phil Armstrong, the power manager for Holy Cross Energy, said he expects the new batteries to be in operation soon. Two more recent battery installations worked immediately and as expected.
Wildfire potential has slowed deployment of batteries in La Plata County. The county has had several major wildfires in the last 25 years. Continued drought combined with warming temperatures cause worries of worse to come.
California has had two fires caused by batteries in recent years. At the most recent, in January 2025, anywhere from 55% to 80% of the 100,000 lithium-ion batteries at the Moss Landing Vistra Energy Storage Facility burned, causing concern about air pollution in the Monterey Bay area. As of January 2026, the cause had not been determined, according to Inside Climate News.
Does La Plata County have a legitimate worry about fire? The Durango Herald, in a December editorial, pointed out that Moss Landing relied on older technology and pre-2018 fire codes.
“Battery safety has advanced quickly,” the newspaper said. It cited a National Labs report of 97% decline in battery energy storage system failure rates since 2018 “thanks to modern fire testing, safer chemistries like lithium-iron phosphate, and strict codes.”
Wamsted, of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, had much the same to say: The big fire at Moss Landing was a mess, clearly, but it used a construction technique no longer used across the industry,” he said. “Those batteries were not containerized, simply placed in the turbine building of the old plant. Now, everything is in a container, so if you have a fire, it stays little.”
In January, the county commissioners voted 2-1 to mandate a 200-foot setback from property lines. That leaves only one of the electrical cooperative’s 28 substations in the county eligible for battery storage without a variance.
The Herald said this approach doesn’t add safety. “It adds delay, cost, and uncertainty.”
Chris Hansen, CEO of La Plata Energy, makes a point as Robert Kenney, CEO of Xcel Energy’s Colorado operations, listens during a recent solar and storage association conference in Denver. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
“Hansen had urged La Plata County to let hazard-mitigation analysis determine the appropriate property setbacks. “Unfortunately, they decided to use a flat number instead,” he said.
It makes our job harder. It makes it more difficult to get a battery project done in La Plata County at the places we think are best. Really, what we’re going to do is show the county that we can do it safely and reliably. We have a site where we can do that right out of the gate, where there’s enough space, and we’ll then cross the next bridge when we get there.”
La Plata Electric’s second project will be in neighboring Archuleta County, where a site has been identified as having urgent need for storage.
Adams, Arapahoe, Denver, and El Paso along with the city of Fort Collins have already adopted codes governing batteries. So have county commissioners in Pitkin County, which Hansen contends has as much fire risk at La Plata. None, he says, are restrictive.
Jeremiah Garrick, of the COSSA Institute, the educational arm of the Colorado Solar and Storage Association, reports Moffat County has also started work on regulations, as have Teller, Delta, Washington and several other counties scattered across Colorado. Logan County adopted regulations in concert with other regulations in anticipation of a hyperscale data center.
Future batteries
Lithium-ion batteries now rule but will likely be displaced in the next few years by lithium-ion phosphate, solid-state, and sodium-ion batteries.
“You’ve already seen Xcel Energy and United Power be able to get these into tighter footprints in a very safe way,” said Hansen. And that will be even easier when new technologies, solid state and sodium-ion batteries, are available in the market, because they basically have no flammability or oxidization risk at all. So you’ll be able to put them in even tighter footprints than the lithium-ion technology.”
Toor, at the Colorado Energy Office, similarly sees varieties of long-duration storage entering the picture.
Pueblo remains scheduled to be the site of deployment of a 100-hour iron-air storage collaboration between Form Energy and Xcel Energy.. A similar collaboration is alreayd underway in Minnesota.
In Pueblo, Xcel Energy, working with Form Energy, plans to deploy 100-hour iron-air storage. The project depends upon federal funding, and the Department of Energy in the Trump administration hit a pause on the project in 2025. Xcel now says it plans to have this new long-time battery storage technology operating in early 2028. Xcel and Form expect to have a project in Minnesota on line sometime in 2026.
Colorado also has several companies trying to be part of this new future.
Solid Power, a company with offices in Louisville and a factory in Thornton, is focused on solid-state batteries. “We need a new breed of battery that looks, acts, and is built like today’s lithium-ion batteries, but that comes with the benefits consumers and automakers have been seeking for decades: longer life, increased safety and lower costs,” the company states.
The company is focused on the auto market, but as Tesla’s batteries demonstrate, the technologies cross lanes from automotive to utilities.
Synthio, which has roots in the Boulder-Golden-Broomfield triangle, specializes in chemistries, including batteries.
In short, storage during the last few years has become the frontier of this big pivot in energy. What may be most remarkable is that the first batteries of any scale were not used in Colorado until little more than seven years ago.
Into the detailed weeds, if you wish:
Colorado Springs Utilities
Colorado Springs Utilities gained access to 100 MW of battery storage in 2025 and plans another 100 MW in “coming years.”
Holy Cross Energy
Holy Cross Energy has three solar-plus-storage projects at the Colorado Mountain College campus, Parachute, and Rifle. They collectively have 55 MW of storage and 24.5 of solar generation.
Platte River Power Authority
Fort Collins-based Platte River Power Authority has a battery adjacent to the Rawhide power plant. Relatively soon, working with NextEra Energy, it will have 100 MW, 4-hour (400 MWh) utility scale battery project in Weld County . Platte River is also working to add four 5-MW/20-MWh battery storage system batteries in each of its four communities: Longmont, Estes Park, Loveland, and Fort Collins.
Tri-State Generation
The portfolio approved by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission calls for 650 MW of battery storage as follows:
Montrose County, 50 MW
Moffat County, 200 MW
Kit Carson County,150 MW
Other places in eastern Colorado, 150 MW
Plus 200 MW in New Mexico.
United Power
United today has 119.5 megawatts and plans another 200 MW to be completed by December 2027.
Xcel Energy
The company’s Rocky Mountain Battery Energy Storage System has 200 MW/800MWh of storage.
Coming online by the end of 2027:
A 200 MW/800 MWh of storage near the Pawnee coal plant, near Brush.
South Park 200 MW/400MWh. Both projects are expected to come online by the end of 2027.
In addition, Xcel is contracting with several other projects through power purchase agreements. Two will come online in 2027, two in 2028. This is in addition to two already in service.
In the past two to three years there’ve been important advances both in enteric methane‑reducing feed additives and in manure‑focused technologies, and several options have progressed from the laboratory to commercial use.
What’s new?
3‑NOP (Bovaer): Now the most advanced commercial additive, approved in 60+ countries and marketed in the U.S. by Elanco, with typical methane reductions of about 30% in dairy and beef cattle at very low doses. It works by inhibiting a key enzyme in the rumen’s methanogenesis pathway without harming animal performance1.
Red seaweed and bromoform products: Asparagopsis‑based seaweed supplements can cut enteric methane by over 80–90% in controlled studies, and work is shifting toward purified bromoform or standardized products rather than raw seaweed to control variability and safety. Several pilot trials are underway in Australia, the EU, and the U.S., but broad regulatory approval is still pending2.
Other additives under study: Research programs (e.g., Teagasc, CSU AgNext) are testing oils, grain‑industry by‑products, probiotics, and other inhibitors; some trials in housed cattle report up to 30% methane reduction with no productivity loss, though pasture‑based delivery remains a major challenge3.
Adoption status: A recent technical review notes that methane‑inhibiting feed additives are now the fastest‑emerging enteric solution, with strong private investment but limited on‑farm uptake so far due to cost, regulation, and farmer skepticism4.
It was early June, and we sat out in the shade in our backyard in Silverton, Colorado, wearing short-sleeves and shorts and drinking cold beverages under a cloudless blue sky. That, in itself, made the day memorable. Blizzards are as likely on Memorial Day as barbecues in this mountain town, elevation 9,318 feet, and sweater-free days usually don’t come along until July.
The winter of 2001-2002 had been unusually mild and a warm April and May had melted what little snow had fallen; the Animas River’s spring runoff had peaked at historically low levels a couple weeks earlier. I, for one, wasn’t too worried. By then it was understood that the climate was warming, and that it could wreak havoc on the planet, but the idea of rising sea levels and devastating heat waves felt pretty abstract in the Colorado high country. Besides, as an amateur historian, I had read accounts of similarly dry and warm winters from the San Juan Mountains’ past: In 1879, the snow was all melted from the highest peaks by May (giving way to the Lime Creek Burn that summer); sleighing was impossible” on Silverton’s streets during the 1890-91 winter; and the newspaper ran a photo of a water wagon suppressing dust on Greene Street on New Year’s Day, 1918, during “one of the most delightful winters ever experienced.”
Vallecito Reservoir during Missionary Ridge Fire via George Weber Environmental.
This, it seemed, was just another one of those occasional weird years, so we figured we might as well enjoy it. Then someone noticed what looked like puffy cumulonimbus cloud rising up in the gap formed by the Animas River gorge. It wasn’t a cloud at all, but a billowing tower of smoke from the Missionary Ridge Fire, ignited that afternoon on a slope about 35 miles south of where we sat. Over the coming weeks, the blaze would eat through 73,000 acres of parched scrub oak and aspen and conifer forest, along with 83 structures. It eclipsed the 26,000-acre Lime Creek Burn as the state’s largest wildfire on record, but lost the title to the Hayman Fire (138,114 acres) that was burning at the same time across the state.
Aerial view from the south of Hayman Fire June 30, 2002. Road traversing from left to right is U.S. Highway 24. Town of Manitou Springs is in lower part of photo, Colorado Springs to the right. Garden of the Gods park defined by three upright orange rock formations in right center just below smoke line. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
And it was then that we realized this was no normal abnormality, and that 2002 would go down as the Water Year of our Discontent: dry, smoky, and catastrophic for irrigators and river rafters alike.
This year is shaping up to be even more dire. Indeed, with temperatures in Silverton climbing into the 60s this week, I’m sure a few people have shed some layers and soaked up the sun — in March. Now, however, we know that this is no anomaly, but part of a long-term trend toward aridification, most likely caused or at least exacerbated by climate change. Call it the “new normal” if you’d like, but just remember the words of Bruce Cockburn: “The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.”
I wanted to wait until April to give this assessment, on the off chance that the weather might shift radically in the last days of March in a way that might give us all some hope. While anything’s still possible, I’ve seen enough to bet that, unfortunately, we may already have seen peak snowpack in many places, making this the driest water year on record by far. And besides, I wanted to get the spring runoff “predict the peak” streamflow contest going before, well, the streamflows actually peaked.
A crappy snow year does not necessarily lead to a nasty fire season, since so many other factors come into play. The same can sort of be true about the peak of the spring runoff. That’s more about timing: A fast melt after a dry winter can result in a bigger, albeit short-lived, peak, than a slow melt of a relatively abundant snowpack. The river’s average flows across the entire water year are much more closely tied to snowpack, but those can also be affected by a big monsoon season.
Still, looking back at similar years in the past can help with predicting flows this year. I’m going to focus on the Animas River in Durango, because it’s my home river, it is unimpeded by dams or major upstream diversions, and it is a good proxy for a lot of other Southwestern rivers, since its headwaters are located in the same mountain range as those of the Rio Grande, the Gunnison, the Dolores, the San Miguel, the San Juan, and the Uncompahgre rivers. If the runoff is weak in the Animas, it is also likely to be weak in all of those other rivers.
The snowpack graph shows that the current heat wave has really taken a toll, and probably launched the spring runoff.
Here’s the temperature graph for the Animas watershed. You can see that it reached a record high for the date of 42.8° F. That doesn’t seem too warm until you consider that the median temperature for March 18 is about 25° F. Probably more significant than this one little blip is the fact that daily temperatures have far exceeded “normal” on dozens of days this winter. Also note the contrast with 2002 (the darker green line).
When you talk to Colorado climate folks and old-timers with good memories, you’ll often hear that the 1977 water year was even drier than 2002. Unfortunately, SNOTEL records typically go back only to the early 1980s, so it’s difficult to make a good apples-to-apples comparison. But by looking at the “natural flow” of the Colorado River, which is the calculated estimate of how much the river would carry without any human intervention, it appears that 1977 was, indeed, the driest winter across the Upper Colorado River Basin since at least 1900.
However, historic Animas River flow data suggest that 2002 was actually drier in southwestern Colorado.
Here’s the average annual daily flow for the Animas. Note that there are several years missing between 1898 and 1911; apparently the USGS did not record flows during those years.
Average stream flows on the Animas River have trended downward over the last century and some, but the river has struggled through extreme dry years in the past. Source: USGS.
Because that graph isn’t so easy to read, here’s a table showing the eleven lowest average daily flow water years. Note that in 1927 they only had 92 records, potentially skewing the results. The 2002 and 2018 water years were lower than in 1977. If snowpack levels correlate with annual average flows, then we could expect this year’s to be around 200 cfs, which is pretty damned dismal.
When I took a look at the peak streamflows for the Animas, I was a bit taken aback to see that in 2002 it topped out above 1,000 cfs, which is more than I would have expected.
Then I saw the date: It peaked in September, after the monsoon arrived, not in the spring. The 2002 spring runoff actually topped out on May 21 at 880 cfs, which was far lower than the 1977 spring peak.
Based on all of that, my Animas River peak streamflow prediction is a bit wacky, but I’m standing by it: It will top out at 700 cfs on April 15.
The rest of the Land Desk community will have a chance to predict the peak starting next week, when I’ll announce the terms, the river gauges in the contest, and the prizes for the winner(s). Most likely it will only be open to paid subscribers, so the time to upgrade is now!
We might as well get even more depressed. Here’s the snowpack graph for the Upper Colorado River Basin, showing 2026, 2002, and 2018 — i.e. the dismal years. Note that the spring melt has begun in earnest. If it continues at this rate, runoff will be over by early May.
And here’s the natural flow graph for Lees Ferry on the Colorado River. Natural flow is the calculation of how much water would be in the river at that point if there were no human diversions or consumptive use upstream. If you compare this to the historic streamflows on the Animas River, you’ll notice that there is a correlation, but it’s not direct. For example, 1977 was the driest year on record for the Colorado River as a whole, with a total volume of just 5.4 million acre-feet, which is about half what the Lower Basin alone was using throughout the 1990s.
The ten lowest years on record are:
1977: 5.4 MAF
2002: 5.9 MAF
1934: 6.6 MAF
2021: 7.2 MAF
1954: 8.3 MAF
2012: 8.4 MAF
2018: 8.5 MAF
2025: 8.5 MAF (provisional)
1981: 8.6 MAF
1931: 8.9 MAF
It looks like we could be in that 5.4 MAF territory once again. That wasn’t a huge deal in 1977, since it was an anomaly. It is a big deal now.
And just so you know, it’s not just the Colorado River watershed that’s in trouble. Even California, which got pummeled by atmospheric rivers, is losing its snow rapidly.
📖 Reading (and watching) Room 🧐
The Upper Basin and Lower Basin may not have come up with a deal yet on how to save the Colorado River’s massive plumbing system, but they are looking for solutions. One of them is creating an Upper Basin conservation pool. Like a lot of issues related to the rivers, it’s a slightly complicated one. But Heather Sackett of Aspen Journalism gives a really great rundown. She’s always a must-read for those looking to understand what’s going on with the Colorado.
🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭
The current heat wave is breaking records across the West. Here’s a little sampling:
If you want a quick and comprehensive look where those records were broken during the last day, week, or month, check out coolwx.com/record. In the side panel you can click on the United States and the time period you wish to see and it will show an animation of all of the records. It looks kind of like this:
Update: I’ve replaced all the graphics that I published early this morning. I hope they are now accurate. All major basins are showing a big drop which was expected with the record heat the past few days.
Demand for copper is surging because of demand from new technologies, but suppliers are struggling to keep up, and they are likely to fall further behind in the coming years, resulting in shortfalls globally. Even though copper prices are at historically high levels, the financial risk involved in mining means that prices will need to go much higher before mining companies see profit in addressing the supply shortage.
Copper is abundant in the ground, but there’s not enough being extracted to be able to meet the demand. That’s because investors want higher and more reliable returns than copper mines currently offer, and the industry faces complex permitting processes and can’t find enough workers. Our analysis found that for new technologies to continue to develop, and for the global economy to continue to grow, even higher prices are ahead.
Recycling existing copper could help reduce the amount needed from new mines, but it would not be enough to meet the rising demand. Even under generous assumptions, we found that recycling might provide 35% of the global copper supply by 2050, with mining producing the remaining 65%.
The only other way to get more copper is to mine more of it. But building a new mine can take 20 to 30 years – a period during which investors are spending money but not yet getting returns, and a time when costs can rise significantly from preliminary estimates.
If industrial and economic growth is to stay on track in the 2030s, new mines would need to be in the financing and permitting processes right now. But they aren’t.
Even Resolution Copper, which started decades ago trying to develop a mine in Arizona outside Phoenix, has more work to do before being able to start mining. Since 1995, the project’s developers have spent several billion dollars on planning, permitting and legal cases.
Once in place, it could meet as much as 25% of U.S. copper demand from a high-concentration body of ore located near existing truck and rail lines.
Evaluating the environmental and community effects of proposed mining projects is essential, but in many countries there are overlapping levels of review that have different, and variable, timelines. And many parts of the process can be appealed to courts by opponents or supporters. That increases costs and imposes time delays for mine developers – and means consumers will have to wait longer, and pay more, for copper-intensive products and services.
Yet even though copper prices are near historic highs – over US$13,000 per ton on the London Metals Exchange – the profit margins are still too low and price swings are too volatile for companies to forecast reliable returns on the risky investment of building new mines.
Metal structures on the site of Resolution Copper’s proposed underground copper mine in Arizona, in a place that has been sacred to Native American people for thousands of years. Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
To get a picture of what might be possible if there were a significant global effort to increase copper availability, we evaluated several optimistic scenarios. We looked at faster permitting for new mines, higher recycling rates and smoother mining processes than those currently in place. But even then, economic development drove demand to grow far faster than the available supply.
Existing mines will have decreasing amounts of ore available and will produce less copper in 2050 than they do in 2025. Yet even if all known copper deposits with known mine-opening dates go into production as scheduled copper supplies will not keep up with demand.
Our best-case scenario has global mine production at about 30 million metric tons of copper a year by 2050. But to keep pace with global economic development, the world will need 37 million metric tons of mined copper a year by then.
To meet that additional need, more mines will need to be opened, and extra production developed – including extracting residual copper from old mine debris that was previously viewed as having too little copper to be worth processing.
Higher copper prices will ripple through the economy, raising costs for construction, energy and technology. But pretending those costs can be avoided doesn’t make them disappear. Underinvestment across the supply chain from mines to processing today shows up as bottlenecks tomorrow, including delayed grid upgrades and constrained digital growth.
Sunlight glimmers on the Colorado River near Page, Arizona on Nov. 2, 2022. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Scott Franz):
March 20, 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.
Critical negotiations about the future of the Colorado River took a two week hiatus last month after the seven states in the basin missed a key Valentine’s Day deadline for striking a deal, New Mexico’s water negotiator said Thursday.
Estevan López said talks resumed March 2, and the upper and lower basin states are using a short-term pitch from Nevada as a starting point.
“Right now, we’re in discussions with the lower basin about a potential short-term agreement,” Lopez told New Mexico’s Interstate Stream Commission.
Nevada is proposing to increase water releases from upper basin reservoirs like Flaming Gorge by at least 500,000 acre feet to help prevent Lake Powell from dropping too low.
The latest forecasts predict that Powell could drop enough to stop producing hydropower by December.
In return, lower basin states would agree to cut their water use by 1.25 million acre feet “until system conditions have meaningfully improved.”
López said upper basin states had a counter proposal and talks about it were scheduled on Thursday afternoon.
“The hydrology right now is incredibly dire,” López said. “So we’re beginning for this year, for the remainder of this water year, we’re suggesting that there needs to be a release from the upper initial units, most likely Flaming Gorge, since that’s the reservoir that’s largest and has the most water. And we are anticipating that there will be a release of half a million acre feet from Flaming Gorge to prop up Lake Powell.”
Meanwhile, the Interior Department is reviewing thousands of comments it received on a range of options for how to manage the vital waterway.
The alternatives were published in January and could result in a variety of scenarios, ranging from significant water reductions in lower basin states to creating new incentives for states to conserve water.
And after the states missed two deadlines to reach an agreement, it’s becoming increasingly likely the federal government will try to piece together its own plan before the current guidelines expire in the fall.
Water negotiators are also facing a worsening water supply forecast with record low snowpack across the West.
A map shows how much water is predicted to arrive at certain locations in the Colorado River basin as of a March 1 forecast.
Cody Moser with the federal Colorado Basin River Forecast Center said last week just 2.3 million acre feet of Colorado River water is expected to reach Lake Powell through July. That’s about a third of what’s considered normal.
“You’ll notice it’s not a pretty picture here with lots of reds,” he said as he presented a color coded map of how much water is expected to reach certain locations in the river basin. “That’s 50 to 70% of normal April through July runoff. Those maroon colors are 30 to 50% and we even have some of those pinks, which indicates less than 30% normal seasonal spring runoff.”
An attorney for New Mexico’s Interstate Stream Commission said Thursday the state expects the Interior Department to identify a preferred option for managing the dwindling river by July. The current operating guidelines for Lake Powell and Lake Mead expire in the fall.
The city of Montrose held a groundbreaking Monday marking the start of a major upgradereaking Monday marking the start of a major upgrade to its wastewater treatment plant, a facility that has operated with much of its original equipment since it was built in the 1980s. The project will replace outdated equipment and install new infrastructure to meet current and future water quality standards set by state and federal regulators. Mayor Dave Frank said the plant’s equipment has become difficult to maintain.
“The equipment in our wastewater treatment plant is original to the building of the wastewater treatment plant,” Frank said. “So when something breaks, they’re having to find parts in museums and junkyards in order to repair the equipment that we currently have.”
[…]
The plant treats sanitary sewage in accordance with federal and state standards, releasing treated water back into the Uncompahgre River. The project will replace existing equipment with newer versions and install a tank for biological phosphorus removal. Wastewater Treatment Plant Superintendent Hyrum Webb said the phosphorus removal addition is a proactive step.
“We want to get ahead of the curve on removing phosphorus out of the water before we’re required to by the state,” Webb said. “It gives us some incentive points to help out with future permitting, and it’ll be cheaper now than when the state mandates us to do so.”
Frank said water quality going back into the river is a priority…The project is expected to take approximately 18 months to complete. The total cost is estimated at $40 million, which will be funded through bonds and reserve funds.
An example of lawn space free of non-native turf grass and filled with native plants that consumer far less water. Courtesy photo
Click the link to read the article on The Vail Daily website (David O. Williams). Here’s an excerpt:
March 15, 2026
Eagle County water officials are urging property owners to voluntarily scale back water usage in a big way this spring and summer, reducing outdoor watering of landscaping in order to avoid fines and to keep water providers from having to declare a water shortage. The idea is to keep people in tiers one and two for outdoor water use – 95% of which does not return to local streams and rivers — and that one of the best ways to do so is water-wise landscaping, or basically tearing up non-native turf grass and going with native plants that require far less outdoor watering…The Eagle County Conservation District runs a program called Beyond Lawn that will assess your yard, give you some ideas on how to minimize turf, how to go with water-wise native plants, reconfigure your irrigation system, find like-minded landscapers, and make sure fines and surcharges from your water provider aren’t part of your future this summer. Beyond Lawn’s wait list is available to join online. There is also a do-it-yourself workshop being held in conjunction with Walking Mountains and the Climate Action Collaborative at 5:30 p.m., Thursday, April 16…
If not exactly a turf war, water officials’ war on turf could gain significant new teeth as Eagle County reworks its land-use codes, according to Snyder, which currently allow for anywhere between 3,000 and 6,500 square feet of irrigated turf for new homes.
“We think that’s excessive,” Snyder said. “(So we’re) putting forward recommendations to narrow that down to 500 square feet, which is still a nice backyard. The hope would be that with new builds, the county and others would pursue land-use code changes that actually would say, ‘this is reasonable.’ And then it gets really hard to overwater 500 square feet.”
Old land-use codes that allowed up to 12,000 square feet of non-native turf have led to people using 60,000 gallons a month (extreme tier five). That kind of water use reduces the shared supply for everything from drinking water to fighting wildfires, and district officials say massively overwatered yards are not any more fire-resistant.
Click the link to read the article on the Pagosa Springs Sun website (Clayton Chaney and Randi Pierce). Here’s an excerpt:
March 19, 2026
Shawn Prochazka is also predicting more record high temperatures to have been set Wednes- day, March 18 (the high temperature reached was not available by press time that day); today, Thursday, March 19; and tomorrow, Friday, March 20. Prochazka predicted temperatures being 25 degrees above normal. Prochazka also notes that the record high for the month of March is 73 degrees, which was set March 19, 1907, and March 23 and 25, 1940. Warm and dry weather is expected to stick around throughout the weekend and into next week, with Prochazka indicating the next chance for precipitation possibly starting around March 25…Temperatures are expected to stay above freezing throughout the weekend in Pagosa Springs as a high of 82 degrees is forecast for Friday, March 20, with a low of 37 degrees and clear skies in the evening…
The drought conditions in the area have also worsened, with the U.S. Drought Monitor showing that 100 percent of Archuleta County was in moderate drought as of March 10, up from 47.89 percent of the county being in moderate drought and 100 percent of the county being abnormally dry the previous week…Snowpack also continues to fall below median levels in the region and across the state. As of Wednesday, the San Miguel, Dolores, Animas and San Juan river basins sat at 45 percent of the March 18 median. The Wolf Creek summit SNOTEL site, which sits at an elevation of 10,930 feet, was at 56 percent of the day’s median, while the Upper San Juan site, which sits at 10,140 feet, was at 49 percent of the day’s median.
On Tuesday, due to the recordbreaking warm temperatures and low snowpack across Colorado, Governor Jared Polis activated the state’s Drought Task Force and Phase 2 of Colorado’s Drought Response Plan. Acting on recommendations from the state’s Water Conditions Monitoring Committee and partner agencies, the task force will help the state bet- ter understand and elevate the local, regional and sector-specific impacts of worsening drought conditions, a press release from the state explains.
“Colorado is experiencing thewarmest year so far in our 131-year record, and one of the driest,” Polis said. “Activating the Drought Task Force will help ensure we are protecting one of our most precious resources by closely tracking impacts, supporting communities and coordinating better as we prepare for the year ahead.”
The Drought Task Force, last activated in 2020, brings together senior leadership from key state agencies, including the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, Colorado Department of Agriculture, Department of Local Affairs, and the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, according to the press release. It further explains that the group assesses drought conditions statewide, elevates local impacts to state leadership, and can convene regional or sector-specific workgroups to gather information and share resources…
As of noon on Wednesday, March 18, the San Juan River at Pagosa Springs was running at a flow of 286 cubic feet per second (cfs), above the median flow for March 18 The median flow for March 18 sits at 121.5 cfs, with a historical low for the date being 39 cfs and the historical high being 1,040 cfs.
Carbon capture has moved from niche demonstrations to early commercial deployment, with rapid progress in new materials, direct air capture plants, and conversion of CO₂ into products. But unfortunately its high cost and the challenge of upscaling it restricts its large-scale implementation.
Carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) covers technologies that trap CO₂ from large sources (power plants, cement, steel), move it, then either store it underground or use it in products. It complements cutting emissions at the source rather than replacing them; most climate scenarios that hit net‑zero use some CCUS for hard‑to‑abate sectors.
Bar graph of global carbon capture and storage, by RCraig09 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
Main types of capture
Post‑combustion: CO₂ is removed from exhaust gases after fuel is burned, typically using chemical solvents; it is the main option for retrofitting existing plants and factories.
Pre‑combustion: fuel is converted to a mixture of hydrogen and CO₂ before burning, and the CO₂ is separated at high pressure; more common in new industrial or power processes.
Oxy‑fuel combustion: fuel burns in nearly pure oxygen, producing a flue gas that is mostly CO₂ and water, which makes capture easier but requires expensive oxygen production.
Direct air capture (DAC): large fans pull ambient air through filters or solvents that bind CO₂; the captured CO₂ is then concentrated and stored or used.
New materials and efficiency gains
New sorbents such as metal‑organic frameworks (MOFs) act like highly porous “sponges” for CO₂ and have enabled lab systems that reach around 99% capture while cutting energy use versus traditional solvents. Recent MOF‑based systems report about a 17% reduction in energy requirements and roughly 19% lower operating costs compared with older capture setups, mainly by improving how CO₂ is adsorbed and released. Solid sorbents and adsorption processes are gaining patent share as industry shifts away from classic liquid amine systems that have higher energy penalties.
Nanotechnology is a hot area: experimental nanomaterials and membranes promise lower‑pressure, lower‑energy capture, and one new nanofiltration membrane platform has been reported to make certain carbon capture steps several times more efficient and up to about 30% cheaper.
Where the captured CO₂ goes
Geological storage: CO₂ is compressed and injected deep underground into depleted oil and gas reservoirs or saline formations, where it is intended to remain trapped for centuries or longer.
Utilization: captured CO₂ can be used to make synthetic fuels, chemicals, and building materials, or for enhanced oil recovery; there is growing focus on converting CO₂ electrochemically into carbon monoxide, methane, or other feedstocks using renewable electricity.
Emerging processes link capture directly with conversion (for example, “power‑to‑gas” that turns CO₂ and hydrogen into methane), offering energy storage and product value but still facing efficiency and cost hurdles.
2026: the Promise vs. the Reality
Activity is accelerating: patent analyses show strong growth in CCUS and DAC, with particular emphasis on new materials, electrochemical processes, and better heat and mass‑transfer engineering to cut costs. Direct air capture is operating at small but growing scales; it attracts attention because it can reduce atmospheric CO₂ directly, but it remains energy‑intensive and expensive per ton compared with capturing from large point sources.
Policy incentives, such as tax credits and industrial decarbonization mandates, are driving more projects in heavy industry, especially in countries like the United States and Canada. But key concerns remain: high capital and operating costs, the need for extensive CO₂ transport and storage infrastructure, and uncertainties about the integrity of long-term storage.
As the American West gets hotter, farmers will need more water to irrigate the same amount of crops1. More water will also be required to cool the generators that will supply energy to an ever-increasing number of air conditioning systems in hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses2.
Why hotter air means thirstier crops
Warmer air has a higher vapor pressure deficit, so it “pulls” more moisture out of soil and plant leaves, increasing evapotranspiration. This means that to get the same crop yield, farmers must apply more water per acre because a larger fraction of applied water is lost to the atmosphere rather than staying in the root zone.
Earlier snowmelt and reduced snowpack in Western mountains expose soils sooner to heat and sun, drying them out faster and further increasing irrigation needs. The same corn field will need more irrigation in 2050 than it did in 1980 just to achieve the same yield, because the atmosphere is “thirstier.”
Why hotter days use more electricity
Steam rising from cooling towers at the CalEnergy JM Leathers Geothermal Plant at California’s Salton Sea. Photo by Robert Marcos
Higher temperatures drive up electricity demand because homes, offices, and industry run air conditioners and refrigeration harder and for longer periods. Much of that electricity still comes from thermoelectric power plants (coal, gas, nuclear) that use large volumes of freshwater for cooling, either withdrawing it and returning it warmer or consuming a portion through evaporation3.
As air and water warm, these plants run less efficiently and may need even more cooling water per unit of electricity generated, increasing water use just when rivers and reservoirs are under stress. In very hot, dry years, this can create a feedback: heat raises AC demand, AC demand raises power plant water demand, low flows and high water temperatures then constrain power plants, risking reliability problems4.
Warming reduces the share of precipitation that reaches reservoirs and aquifers: more evaporates or is soaked up by drier soils before it becomes runoff. Western water systems and legal allocations were designed assuming a more stable climate and more reliable snowpack; under warming, those assumptions are breaking down, reducing dependable supplies for both farms and power plants. The result is a tightening water budget: less water coming into the system at the same time that crops, cities, and energy systems are all asking for more.
The seven U.S. states that make up the Colorado River basin are struggling to agree on how best to manage the river’s water as its supply dwindles due to climate change and a period of prolonged drought. Their negotiations, which are not open to the public, missed a Feb. 14, 2026, deadline the federal government had established, after which federal officials said they would impose their own plan.
The federal government has not yet done so, but the prospect of such an action is not good news for the nearly 40 million people who depend on the Colorado River for water, energy, agriculture and recreation, nor for the estimated US$1.4 trillion in economic activity the river supports.
But compromise on Colorado River management is possible and, in fact, was achieved to curb California’s water use in the 2000s, to negotiate an interim agreement to coordinate operations at the Lake Mead and Lake Powell reservoirs in 2007, and to enact contingency plans to manage drought in 2019. But this time around, circumstances are different.
The negotiators for the states had long-standing relationships and built trust by frequently communicating outside formal meetings and seeking to listen to and understand other states’ perspectives, even if they didn’t agree.
The states also agreed to use the bureau’s computer model for analyzing scenarios of climate change and management decisions. That meant all the negotiators were looking at the same data when delving into possible options. And the political and social environment was less polarized than today.
The current situation
In this round of negotiations, federal leadership has been lagging. The Department of the Interior has not made clear what the consequences might be for the states if they fail to agree. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has been without a permanent commissioner since President Donald Trump retook office in January 2025.
The states are fractured into subgroups, according to whether they are in the river’s Upper Basin – Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico – or the Lower Basin, which includes Arizona, Nevada and California. Each basin group holds strong positions and has generally been unwilling to shift.
Each basin group is using a different set of assumptions for the bureau’s computer model to explore options. And the discussion often gets stuck on details, which prevents progress toward broader agreements.
But those relatively new challenges to Colorado River compromise are not an excuse for failure.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, center between flags, meets with governors and representatives of the seven Colorado River basin states in January 2026. U.S. Department of the Interior via X
A way forward?
The current negotiations have all been done behind closed doors. From talking with people involved in the negotiations, we understand the negotiators have been left to set their own agendas and meeting plans and conduct their own communications and follow-up, with no formal facilitators.
It’s reasonable to expect the negotiators to be ready to represent their states’ interests, working through an incredibly complicated landscape of hydrology, climate and management scenario modeling, water law and administration, and politics. But we believe it’s unreasonable – and unrealistic and unfair – to expect them to also be experts at designing and facilitating an effective process for sorting out their differences.
Federal officials are not necessarily the best people to run the process either. And if the agency that ultimately needs to approve any deal is the one leading the process, real or perceived biases about the states or key issues in the agreement could further complicate the discussions.
We believe that agreement between the seven states is still possible. It may be less effective to bring in a third-party facilitator at this stage in the negotiation process, though, because of the degraded trust, hardened positions and shortage of time.
A more hopeful possibility is that the bureau adopts short-term rules that would give the states another chance to negotiate a longer-term deal – ideally with an unbiased third-party facilitator for support.
A collaborative and consensus-based planning process in the Yakima River Basin in Washington state in the early 2010s is evidence that while nobody gets everything they want in a negotiated agreement, “if they can (all) get something, that’s really the basis of the plan,” as a Washington state official told The New York Times.
We are two and a half decades into the Southwest’s most severe drought of the last 1,200 years, and this winter’s snow dearth is one of the most extreme on record.
Without an April-May miracle, human-caused climate change likely will finally catch up with the Colorado River—and the 40 million people who rely on it—in the form of a full-blown crisis later this year.
“Drought” may be too hopeful a word, since it implies an eventual end. Most climate scientists refer to the phenomenon as “long-term aridification,” caused by a lack of rain and snow and warming temperatures.
The West has just experienced its warmest winter since record-keeping began in 1895. The average October-through-December temperature in some parts of the region has been more than 8° F warmer than the 20th-century mean. This is a huge anomaly.
In Gunnison County, Colorado, one of the colder places in the nation, the average minimum temperature for that four-month stretch was about 19° F. That doesn’t seem so bad until you realize that back in 1990, another dry, warm winter, the corresponding measure was 13.6° F. For the Upper Colorado River Basin, the average minimum temperature for that four-month stretch was about 26° F, the warmest on record.
The warmer temperatures tinker with the health of the watershed.
This water year, which began Oct. 1, started out with record-high precipitation in some areas, most of which fell as rain. That helped fend off severe drought conditions. But what really counts is the mountain snowpack, which serves as a giant natural reservoir that supplies at least 70% of the Colorado River’s water each year. Warm temperatures have left some areas snow-free even in parts of Wyoming, where the white stuff normally would be piled high in March.
The diminishing snow has, in turn, shrunk the Colorado River. The “natural” flow—or an estimate of how much water the river would carry without upstream diversions or human consumption—has been below 15 million acre-feet (MAF) at Lees Ferry during 20 of the last 26 years, with an average flow of 12.25 MAF during that time.
This matters, because when the Colorado River Compact of 1922 parceled out the river’s waters, the river was assumed to carry an average annual flow of at least 16.5 MAF. Demand has significantly exceeded supply for the last 26 years, forcing the drawdown of the watershed’s big savings accounts, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, to about one-third of their capacity.
Meanwhile, to comply with the Colorado River Compact of 1922—the document that serves as the Ten Commandments for the management of the river’s waters—the Upper Basin States must release, on average, at least 7.5 MAF from Glen Canyon Dam each year.
Given that the Upper Basin states need a bunch of water to keep their cities and farms from drying up, and that an additional 800,000 acre-feet evaporates or seeps into the underlying rocks at Lake Powell each year, you can see how the warming climate wreaks havoc on the math of the Colorado River.
The entire river system now teeters on the brink, and this year’s snow drought may be what pushes it over the edge.
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
The Bureau of Reclamation’s latest forecast says Lake Powell’s surface level is likely to drop below the minimum level needed for power production later this year. This so-called “deadpool” would not only mean the end of hydropower production, it would also force all of the dam’s releases to go through the river’s 8-foot-wide, steel outlet tubes, which were not made for sustained use. This could compromise the tubes and the dam itself.
It’s possible that the dam would even be shifted to a run-of-the-river operation, in which releases equal the amount of water flowing into the reservoir, minus evaporation and seepage. That would almost certainly result in water shortages downstream, at the very least for the Central Arizona Project, which serves the Phoenix metro area.
This quandary didn’t sneak up on us.
The seven Colorado River states and the federal water managers can’t agree on who should make what cuts in consumption. The feds, meanwhile, haven’t gotten around to re-engineering Glen Canyon Dam or creating a bypass around it that would enable the water to keep flowing. It’s almost as if they’ve been paralyzed by the belief that dry winters were just a minor glitch.
Now, as the spring runoff gets underway, it has become clear that nature won’t save us: We have no choice but to live within increasingly meager limits.
Jonathan Thompson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a longtime journalist and author about the West.
Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website:
March 20, 2026
Drought conditions are forecast to worsen or develop for many areas in the West and south-central Plains, according to NOAA’s Spring Outlook released today for April through June. Forecasters from NOAA’s National Weather Service also predict above-normal temperatures for the majority of the U.S.
“Factors influencing NOAA’s Spring Outlook include the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), low snowpack in the West and soil moisture content throughout the lower 48 states,” said Ken Graham, director of NOAA’s National Weather Service. “This spring will also feature a transition from La Niña to ENSO-neutral conditions, meaning neither El Niño nor La Niña.”
This map depicts where drought persistence, development or improvement is the most likely outcome based on short- and long-range statistical and dynamical forecasts from March 19 through June 30, 2026. (Image credit: NOAA) Download Image
As of mid-March, moderate to exceptional drought conditions exist across 55% of the continental United States.
“Drought conditions worsened or developed for much of the Great Plains, Lower Mississippi Valley, and Southeast U.S. due to warmer and drier than normal conditions this winter,” said Jon Gottschalck, chief of the Operational Prediction Branch, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. “Drought is likely to persist across much of the West while developing in parts of the Pacific Northwest, Great Basin, central Rockies and Southwest. Dry conditions are expected to improve for some areas in the Midwest and Atlantic seaboard.”
The temperature outlook for April through June shows above-normal temperatures are favored across the majority of the western U.S. eastward to include much of the Plains, the lower and middle Mississippi Valley, the Ohio Valley, the Tennessee Valley, the Southeast and the southern Mid-Atlantic. The highest likelihood of enhanced warmth ranges from the Southwest to the Inter-Mountain West. Below-normal temperatures are forecast for east central Alaska.The precipitation outlook favors below-average precipitation for the Pacific Northwest, parts of the Great Basin, Southwest, central High Plains and most of the Rockies. The greatest likelihood of below-average precipitation is forecast from the Pacific Northwest to the central Rockies. While above-normal precipitation is forecast for western Alaska, the eastern Great Lakes, mid-Atlantic and parts of the Southeast.
Spring flood risk
This map depicts the locations where there is a greater than 50% chance of minor, moderate or major flooding from April through June, 2026.(Image credit: NOAA) Download Image
NOAA’s National Hydrologic Assessment, issued by NOAA’s National Water Center, evaluates a number of factors, including current conditions of snowpack, drought, soil saturation levels, frost depth, streamflow and precipitation.
The overall flood risk across most of the continental U.S. for Spring 2026 is currently assessed as normal to below normal. This risk determination was made primarily because of a dry and warm winter that resulted in dry soils over much of the eastern U.S., mitigating the threat of rainfall-driven flooding. Additionally, a well-below-normal snowpack across most of the country will reduce the risk of snowmelt-driven flooding.
However, the Red River of the North and the lower Ohio Valley typically experience flooding annually; therefore, flooding is anticipated in these basins this year as well.
“We anticipate typical spring flooding this year over portions of the Greater Mississippi River Basin, but the risk for widespread significant flooding is low,” said Ed Clark, director of NOAA’s National Water Center. “However, it is crucial to remember that heavy rainfall has the potential to lead to a major flooding event.”
Flooding can occur rapidly from intense rainfall, even in regions with a generally low risk. Rainfall intensity and location can only be accurately forecast days in the future, and flood risk can change rapidly. Stay current on flood risks in your area with the latest official watches and warnings at weather.gov. For detailed hydrologic conditions and forecasts, please visit water.noaa.gov.
Lake Powell, on the Colorado River, is seen from the air in 2019. The Upper Basin states are planning how to potentially fill a dedicated pool in the nation’s second largest reservoir. CREDIT: ECOFLIGHT
With a Lake Powell conservation pool nearly guaranteed for the future of Colorado River management, the four Upper Basin states are exploring and refining the ways they could fill it.
Conservation by those states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) could be one of the keys to reaching a deal among the seven states that share the Colorado River and an important part of the framework for managing the drought-stricken river after this year. The water saved by the Upper Basin states could be stored in Lake Powell as a means of maintaining higher water levels and as an insurance policy against drastic cuts.
This type of pool isn’t yet being used in Lake Powell; it would have to be established by an agreement among the seven states. An agreement in the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan allowed for a 500,000 acre-foot Upper Basin storage pool in Lake Powell, but so far, the states have not utilized this and the agreement expires this year.
The Upper Basin and Lower Basin (California, Arizona and Nevada) have been at an impasse for more than two years about how the nation’s two largest reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — will be managed and shortages shared in the future. The situation has never been more dire: The current guidelines for river management expire at the end of the year, while record-low snowpack is expected to push reservoir levels below critical thresholds. The seven states have blown past two deadlines to come up with a plan, and the federal government is gearing up for emergency actions to manage reservoirs.
The crux of the disagreement between the two basins has been over 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 its water users already take cuts in some years because streams run dry by midsummer and any contributions they make must be voluntary.
TThe main boat ramp at Wahweap Marina was unusable due to low water levels in Lake Powell in December 2021. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is projecting that the reservoir will fall below critical thresholds later this year. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Contribution not conservation
Some Upper Basin officials have made a slight shift in the way they now talk about a pool in Lake Powell. No longer referred to as a conservation pool, it is called a “contribution” pool, reflecting the different methods — not only conservation of agricultural water — of contributing water to a Lake Powell pool.
Traditionally, the Colorado River basin states have turned to programs that pay irrigators to voluntarily leave fields dry for a season or two as the primary way to cut water use. With agriculture representing the majority of water use in the Upper Basin, it’s often the low-hanging fruit when it comes to water savings.
But at least two Upper Basin states are turning to other methods to contribute water to a Lake Powell pool.
For example, New Mexico can contribute water from Navajo Reservoir that it leases from a tribe. In Colorado, the method is less straightforward, but officials say the state is prioritizing and expanding existing programs and projects that save water.
“When you talk about things like turf removal, water-loss prevention, watershed restoration, forest-health efforts that are happening on the ground, those are benefits not only to Colorado but to the entire system,” said Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s lead negotiator in talks among the seven states that share the Colorado River. “So we’re trying to figure out: How do we acknowledge all of that work?”
Raymond Langstaff, a rancher and president of the Bookcliff Conservation District, irrigates a parcel north of Rifle. The state of Colorado explored the feasibility of a demand management program that would pay irrigators to cut back, but did not implement one. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Utah touts pragmatic approach
Over its run in 2023 and 2024, the federally funded System Conservation Pilot Programdoled out $45 million to Upper Basin irrigators to cut their use by about 100,000 acre-feet. Utah water users received about $15 million of that in exchange for temporarily forgoing about 37,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water. The state put lessons learned with SCPP to use and is now in the second year of its own demand management pilot program, funded by $5 million from the state legislature and run by the Colorado River Authority of Utah.
The pilot program lets water users temporarily participate in a conservation program, and pays them $390 an acre-foot of water to do it. In 2025, Utah sent about 8,000 acre-feet downstream to Lake Powell under this pilot program, according to Marc Stilson, deputy director and principal engineer of the authority. There are a couple industrial water users and one municipal water user among the participants, but the majority are agricultural, he said.
“The pilot program is trying to iron out all these issues so that if we end up with some type of post-2026 commitment to do these types of voluntary conservation programs, we’re ready to do it,” Stilson said. “There is a very pragmatic approach in Utah looking at the big picture, and I think generally there is a sense that we have to adapt to changing conditions.”
Whether the program will continue after this year is unclear and could depend on whether the states reach a deal.
“We were anticipating that we’d have an agreement and that these types of programs would be part of that agreement,” Stilson said. “I think we just have to take a wait-and-see approach.”
Wyoming is also looking to traditional programs: State lawmakers are establishing a voluntary water conservation program. Wyoming state engineer and lead negotiator Brandon Gebhart did not respond to phone calls, emails or a list of questions from Aspen Journalism.
Boater on the San Juan River in May 2023. New Mexico officials say they can contribute water to a pool in Lake Powell through releasing water they lease in Navajo Reservoir. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
New Mexico seeks ‘more diverse’ ways to contribute water
The state of New Mexico plans to contribute to a Powell pool mostly through 20,000 acre-feet of Navajo Reservoir water, which it leases from the Jicarilla Apache Nation and can be released down the San Juan River. Along the way to Lake Powell, it boosts flows for endangered fish. Officials say because they can control when they release the water, it can be tracked with certainty to the reservoir.
“We all need to focus on more diverse ways of contributions, not just the classic conserved consumptive use,” said Ali Effati, Colorado River basin bureau chief for the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission.
Water managers say that automatically turning to agricultural water isn’t always reliable because as climate change continues to rob rivers of flows, even if senior water users want to participate in these types of conservation programs, they may not have any water to spare in dry years.
“That doesn’t mean that we have shied away from those sorts of activities, but to the extent that we can do our part without having to ask our agricultural community to cut water where they already take significant cuts almost annually, that’s just a preferable perspective,” said Estevan Lopez, lead negotiator for New Mexico.
Lopez said the likelihood of seeing a future Upper Basin contribution pool in Lake Powell is nearly 100% and that New Mexico will be ready, willing and able to contribute its share of water when the time comes.
“We have our percentage easily covered, plus a significant amount more,” he said.“We have our percentage easily covered, plus a significant amount more,” he said.
TThese hay bales stand ready to be collected on a ranch outside of Carbondale in July 2024. Upper Basin states have traditionally looked to agricultural to conserve water, but some are now turning to other ways to contribute water. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Colorado points to programs already in place
Colorado water users participated in both years of SCPP, but the state has been reluctant to take the leap into setting up its own program, despite being an early leader of the conservation conversation among the Upper Basin states.
In 2019, Colorado convened nine workgroups to explore the feasibility of a demand management program. The process included Colorado River water users from across the state and in multiple water-use sectors, who looked at how to set up a temporary, voluntary, compensated state program. But in 2022, the state water board shelved the studies without implementing a program, in favor of focusing on drought-resiliency initiatives.
Mitchell said the demand management feasibility investigation was an incredibly valuable exercise, but that there are still a number of open questions. Inaction on a demand management program doesn’t mean inaction on conservation overall, she said.
“The CWCB board voted to pause that investigation until there was clarity about whether any such program would be achievable, worthwhile and advisable and until there’s evidence that a demand management-esque program would benefit Colorado,” Mitchell said.
In 2023, Colorado lawmakers created a task force to again examine how the state could implement demand reduction and conservation programs. Water managers punted the issue again, failing to make recommendations to lawmakers on this topic, with some members saying conservation programs were “premature.”
The state still does not seem to have the policies in place to implement a large-scale, traditional conservation program in the near future. Mitchell said Colorado’s plan to contribute water to a Lake Powell pool is through the programs and projects already in place, many of which are funded through the state’s Water Plan grants.
At its March meeting, the CWCB approved more than $13 million for 38 projects across the state, according to a press release. They include things like urban turf replacement, creek and wetland restoration, outdoor water budgeting and wildfire ready action plans.
“Our strategy is to continue on with the programs that are already in existence, continue to fund conservation efforts that benefit all Coloradans as well as the entire system, continue to live within the means of the river and adapt our uses to align with available supply,” Mitchell said. “Because of all those programs already set up, we believe we have the majority of the structure in place.”
But Mitchell would not put a number on the amount of water that Colorado could contribute.
“We want to be a part of the solution when and how we are able to, but no, I’m not going to say we can do 100,000 acre-feet in a year like this,” she said.
Colorado River watchers may soon get some clarity around exactly how — and how much — Upper Basin states plan to contribute to a Lake Powell pool. On March 24, the Upper Colorado River Commission plans to consider projects to include in a “provisional accounting” memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, according to UCRC Director Chuck Cullom.
Some Upper Basin projects that are not traditional agricultural conservation programs may be counted under the MOU, allowing the states to “get credit” for the water they save through unconventional means. Cullom said the UCRC and Bureau of Reclamation will also soon have an accounting report of water-saving activities undertaken in 2025.
Mitchell said Colorado is still committed to a seven-state consensus agreement and wants to avoid litigation. But acknowledgement of what the Upper Basin is already doing to cut back on water use will be important.
“The MOU is one component where we would like to see some sort of real acknowledgement of what is occurring in terms of the way that we live within the means of the river and what our strict administration is doing,” Mitchell said. “As long as we are not acknowledged in what’s happening on the ground, I think we’re going to have struggles.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
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 March 16, 2026, was at or near record lows: The Colorado River Basin within Denver Water’s collection system was at 71% of normal. The South Platte River Basin within Denver Water’s collection area was 54% of normal. In Denver Water’s decades of records for its watershed collection areas, as of March 16, Colorado River snowpack ranked the third-worst on record, and the South Platte River snowpack remains ranked at the worst.
No matter what, Denver Water’s annual summer watering rules will always be in place during the irrigation season. And, it is likely that we will need to implement additional drought response measures this year. Denver Water’s response to drought conditions uses a layered approach, including the potential for additional watering restrictions, in order to preserve water supplies. Denver Water is developing recommendations on a potential drought response for the Board of Water Commissioners to consider over the next several weeks.
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 March 16, 2026
Conditions remain highly concerning. Poor snowfall combined with warm temperatures have left us roughly 3 feet to 4 feet of snow short of where we’d prefer to be in the Denver Water collection area at this time. To reach the normal spring snowpack peak, which typically occurs in April, we need to see an additional 7 feet to 7.5 feet of snow this spring.
Reservoir storage conditions are below average, but in reasonably good shape: as of March 16, 2026, the reservoirs were 80% full versus an average of 85% full for this time. Those levels are also temporarily 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 the snowpack.
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 Greg Fisher, Denver Water’s manager of demand planning:
“Another weekend snowstorm was welcome, though it mainly benefited lower elevations along the Front Range. Unfortunately, mountain regions didn’t receive significant snow. The good news is that moisture we get in the Denver region should give our yards and landscapes a good dose of moisture, limiting the need for any watering this week,” said Greg Fisher, Denver Water’s manager of demand planning.
“Overall, we’ve had an extremely dry winter, and that continues this week — the last week of winter — with unusually warm temperatures expected across the region. That could lead to snow melt even at high elevations and highlights the need to conserve water and limit the pull on our reservoir storage. We continue to emphasize the need to keep irrigation systems off until mid-to-late May at the earliest, and to be prepared for outdoor watering restrictions this spring.
“It’s a good time to consider landscape changes to your yard, with plants and grasses that require far less water and are far more adapted to Colorado’s dry stretches. Such landscapes, once established, can get through dry stretches like this far easier, and with far less water, and still give your yard a colorful and vibrant look.”
Denver Water has many resources for homeowners looking for inspiration and information about landscapes that fit naturally into our dry climate. Click here for conservation and efficiency tips for outdoor irrigation and to get more details on ways to ColoradoScape your property, including through rebates for turf removal and a DIY guide for landscape changes, among many other potential water-saving steps.
This chart shows the cumulative snowpack on March 16, 2026, in the area of the Colorado River Basin where Denver Water captures its water supply. The snowpack is 71% of normal, which ranks third-lowest on record for March 16. Image credit: Denver Water.
This chart shows the cumulative snowpack on March 16, 2026, in the area of the South Platte River Basin where Denver Water captures its water supply. The snowpack is 54% of normal, which ranks as the lowest on record for March 16. Image credit: Denver Water.
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 February 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.
Novedades de Denver Water sobre el deshielo de la montaña y el suministro de agua
Novedades sobre el deshielo de la montaña del 16 de marzo de 2026 para el área de recolección de agua de Denver Water.
Denver Water depende del deshielo de la montaña para el 90 % de su suministro de agua, el cual da servicio a 1.5 millones de personas en Denver y en los suburbios de alrededor.
En 16 de marzo de 2026, el deshielo de la montaña se encontraba cerca de niveles históricamente bajos: La cuenca del río Colorado dentro del sistema de recolección de Denver Water estaba al 71 % de lo normal. La cuenca del río South Platte dentro del área de recolección de agua de Denver Water estaba al 54 % de lo normal. En las décadas de registros de Denver Water sobre sus cuencas hidrográficas de recolección, al 16 de marzo el deshielo de la montaña en la cuenca del río Colorado ocupaba el tercer peor lugar y el deshielo de la montaña en la cuenca del río South Platte ocupaba el peor de todos.
Pase lo que pase, las reglas anuales de riego en verano de Denver Water siempre estarán vigentes durante la temporada de riego. Además, es probable que este año sea necesario implementar medidas adicionales de respuesta ante una sequía. La respuesta de Denver Water a condiciones de sequía utiliza un enfoque por niveles, que incluye la posibilidad de aplicar restricciones adicionales de riego para preservar el suministro de agua.
Denver Water está preparando recomendaciones para la Junta de Comisionados del Agua de Denver sobre una posible respuesta a la sequía en las siguientes semanas.
Desde 2000, la respuesta de Denver Water a condiciones secas en años anteriores incluyó la emisión de una alerta de sequía (restricciones voluntarias) en 2002, 2003, 2004, 2012 y 2013. En algunos de esos años (2002, 2003, 2004 y 2013), Denver Water impuso restricciones adicionales por sequía como parte de la declaración de una respuesta de Nivel 1, la cual exigía reducciones obligatorias en el uso de agua en exteriores.
Novedades sobre el deshielo de la montaña de Denver Water al 16 de marzo de 2026
Las condiciones siguen siendo motivo de gran preocupación. Las escasas nevadas, combinadas con temperaturas cálidas, han dejado aproximadamente entre 3 y 4 pies de nieve por debajo de lo que sería deseable en el área de recolección de Denver Water para esta época. Para alcanzar el pico normal de deshielo de la montaña en primavera, que por lo general se produce en abril, necesitamos ver entre 7 y 7.5 pies adicionales de nieve esta primavera.
Las condiciones de almacenamiento en los embalses están por debajo del promedio, pero razonablemente en buen estado: al 16 de marzo de 2026, los embalses estaban llenos al 80 %, frente a un promedio del 85 % para esta época. Estos niveles también se ven afectados temporalmente por la necesidad de mantener bajo el nivel del embalse Gross durante la construcción para elevar la presa, un proyecto diseñado para aumentar la capacidad de almacenamiento del embalse.
Pase lo que pase, las reglas anuales de riego en verano de Denver Water siempre estarán vigentes durante la temporada de riego. Las restricciones adicionales por sequía, voluntarias u obligatorias, dependerán en parte de cómo evolucione el resto de la temporada de nieve y estarán orientadas a preservar el suministro de agua en caso de que este período inusualmente seco se convierta en una sequía de varios años.
Comentario de Greg Fisher, gerente de planificación de la demanda de Denver Water:
“Le dimos la bienvenida a otra tormenta invernal este pasado fin de semana, aunque solo beneficiaron áreas con elevación bajas en el Front Range. Desafortunadamente, las regiones montañosas no recibieron cantidades de nieve significativas. Las buenas noticias es que la humedad que recibimos en la región de Denver le dio a nuestros jardines y paisajismos una buena dosis de humedad y así limitar el riego esta semana.
“Hemos tenido un invierno muy seco y estas condiciones continuaran esta semana, la última semana de invierno, con temperaturas inusualmente altas anticipadas a través de la región. Continuamos enfatizando la importancia de mantener sus sistemas de riego apagados hasta mediados o finales de mayo y estar preparados para posibles restricciones de riego esta primavera.”
Denver Water cuenta con muchos recursos para propietarios de viviendas que buscan inspiración e información sobre paisajes que se integren de forma natural en nuestro clima seco. Haga clic aquí para obtener consejos de conservación y eficiencia para el riego exterior y conocer más detalles sobre maneras de aplicar ColoradoScapes en su propiedad, lo que incluye reembolsos por la eliminación de césped y una guía para realizar cambios en el paisajismo por cuenta propia, entre muchas otras medidas para ahorrar agua.
Puede encontrar información adicional sobre la planificación ante sequías de Denver Water aquí (en inglés). Puede encontrar información adicional sobre los niveles de los embalses de Denver Water, el uso de agua de los clientes y el deshielo de la montaña en el informe Water Watch Report (en inglés), que se actualiza con regularidad durante el invierno, la primavera y el verano.
City water officials are sounding increasingly urgent alarms about Aurora’s water supply, warning that worsening drought conditions and poor snowpack could force early and potentially escalating restrictions this year. Aurora Water General Manager Marshall Brown told city leaders yesterday that the situation has deteriorated enough that staff will likely recommend a formal Stage 1 drought declaration as early as April 6, nearly a month ahead of the city’s typical seasonal watering restrictions. If approved by the City Council, new limits on water use would take effect April 7, officials said.
“Our water supply situation is actually bleak enough that, if things don’t improve, and we don’t get a community response that we need during a Stage 1 restriction, the forecast indicates we may be in a Stage 2 restriction by the end of the year,” Brown said. “That would be really dramatic.”
Aurora breaks water supply and restrictions into four categories:
Normal: Current permanent rules limit landscape irrigation from 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. for a maximum of three days per week.
Stage I: Considered when reservoir levels are lower, often reducing outdoor irrigation to two days per week.
Stage II: More stringent, potentially reducing irrigation to one day per week.
Stage III: Emergency conditions with severe restrictions, including no landscape irrigation.
The warning marks a notable shift from just weeks ago, when city leaders said conditions were concerning but not yet dire. Now, officials say a combination of record warmth, minimal precipitation and dwindling snowpack has pushed the system closer to critical thresholds. According to the latest Aurora Water report, conditions across Colorado remain deeply dry. More than 75% of the state is classified as abnormally dry, with over half in moderate drought and significant portions in severe to extreme drought. February and March so far have offered little relief, statewide water officials reported. Those trends are expected to continue. Long-range forecasts from federal agencies indicate warmer and drier-than-normal conditions through the spring, further reducing the likelihood of meaningful runoff to replenish reservoirs.
Henry Muñoz, a former miner and resident of Superior, Arizona, overlooks a portion of Oak Flat—part of Tonto National Forest and a sacred site for the San Carlos Apache. Credit: Wyatt Myskow/Inside Climate News
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:
March 16, 2026
Key Points
A U.S. Court of Appeals denied a request to halt a land exchange at Oak Flat, clearing the way for mining work to begin.
Resolution Copper now owns the land, which is sacred to the Apache people, and plans to begin exploratory drilling.
Opponents, including the San Carlos Apache Tribe, have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, citing religious freedom.
Resolution Copper told the U.S. Supreme Court it would begin exploratory drilling in the Oak Flat area on March 16 after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals turned down a bid from a coalition of environmentalists, the San Carlos Apache Tribe and a group of Apache women to halt a contentious land exchange. The three-judge panel issued its decision late Friday, March 13. Resolution relayed documents to the high court affirming the land exchange occurred shortly after the court rendered its decision. Resolution now owns Oak Flat, a location sacred to the Apaches and other Native people. The Forest Service issued the final record of decision March 16 finalizing the land exchange.
“The national security of America depends on our ability to harness the abundant natural resources we are blessed with in this country,” said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins in a statement. “The Resolution Copper project is a prime example of bureaucratic and legal chokeholds preventing our rural communities, supply chains, and defense industry from producing the minerals we need right here in America.”
The appeals court denied an injunction in three cases, blocking a legal move that could have halted progress on the handover of the 2,200-acre site and another 211 acres currently within Tonto National Forest to Resolution, the British-Australian mining company, while the lawsuits continue to make their way through the court system. Miles Coleman, one of the attorneys representing the Brown-Lopez family and other Apache women, said the firm filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court over the weekend.
“The transfer and destruction of Oak Flat would be a tragic departure from our nation’s founding promise of religious freedom,” Coleman told The Arizona Republic. He said the emergency application with the Supreme Court asked to preserve the status quo and protect Oak Flat.
The ruling came more than two months after the judges heard the three cases on Jan. 8. The judges turned the three down because they said the cases were “unlikely to succeed on the merits.”
Lamar Fields, a tribal member, gathers blue corn to sample. With increasingly unreliable access to water, flexible crops like corn have become integral to the farm’s survival. To increase revenue, the farm built a mill to process crops like blue corn. Caitlin Ochs
For a century, the Colorado River has been managed in pieces. Legally and politically, it’s divided into two basins, with each state and community focused on securing its respective water supply. But that is not how a river functions. The Colorado River is an interconnected system, sustained by Rocky Mountain snowpack, rainfall and groundwater.
It is fragile, and under increasing stress. Two and a half decades into this century, the river that built the modern West has 20% less water flowing through it than it did on average in the last century. As heat and drought intensify, so do the stakes: Failure to recognize the severity of changing conditions, managing the river in parts without considering needs of the whole and inadequate planning for long-term shortages put the future of all the basin at risk.
For the last five years, I have documented how the Colorado River Basin’s farmers are navigating water shortages and uncertainty amid deep political divisions about the river’s future. This project, called American Adaptation, examines three agricultural communities whose survival is threatened by a shrinking river, examining what happens to people when policies and water management struggle to keep pace with a changing climate.
In one of the river’s northern watersheds, the Ute Mountain Farm and Ranch Enterprise is adapting its management as the water it relies on becomes less dependable. In central Arizona, farmers have returned to well water after becoming the first communities to have their supply cut off completely due to the basin-wide shortage. And in California’s Imperial Valley, the farms that receive the river’s largest water allocation are under growing pressure to share the burden of shortage.
Together, their stories illustrate the stakes — and rising tensions — of the current negotiations over the river’s future management. States, tribal nations and the federal government are reckoning with 100 years of developing water infrastructure based on assumptions of continuing abundance and expansion. These ideas — and the legal frameworks built around them — are colliding with the reality of a river with much less water than expected, raising complex questions about what the Colorado can sustain, how its water should be used and who will shoulder the necessary cuts.
The Dolores Project, located in the Dolores and San Juan River Basins in southwestern Colorado, develops water from the Dolores River for irrigation, municipal and industrial users, recreation, fish and wildlife, and hydroelectric power. It also provides vital water to the Dove Creek area, central Montezuma Valley area, and to the Towaoc area on the Ute Mountain Ute Indian Reservation. McPhee Dam and Reservoir is the principle storage feature of the Dolores Project which includes a system of canals, tunnels, and laterals to deliver water to over 61,000 acres of land. Photo credit: Kenny Browning/Flickr
When Water is Uncertain
On 7,600 acres painstakingly carved out of desert brush, the Ute Mountain Farm and Ranch, a tribally run enterprise of the Ute Mountain Ute nation, produces cattle, alfalfa, corn and wheat. Its operations are led by Simon Martinez, Eric Whyte and Michael Vicente, who have deep personal connections to the enterprise. Martinez helped build the dam for the reservoir that provides the farm’s water, while Whyte cleared desert brush and mapped where the fields would go. Vicente, as the lead irrigator, can account for every drop of water that’s used.
In good years, the farm’s circular fields flourish in brilliant green bursts. But the past decade has brought increasingly erratic access to water. Each spring, the local irrigation district announces potential cuts after assessing snowpack runoff and the available water stored in nearby McPhee Reservoir. In 2021, the farm received just 10% of its water allocation and was forced to leave 6,000 acres unplanted. In 2022, 30% of the water came in, and last year, 34%, which the farm was able to increase to 50% after leasing shares from other water users.
To survive, they adapted. Every year, the farm’s leadership creates numerous plans for different water scenarios. They have applied for grants, implemented low-flow nozzles in the irrigation system, installed small-scale hydropower generators. They joined a Land Institute pilot program to test crops that use less water.
On a day in late May [2022] when wildfire smoke obscured the throat of an ancient volcano called Shiprock in the distance, I visited the Ute Mountain Ute farming and ranching operation in the southwestern corner of Colorado. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
“We still haven’t thrown the towel in,” said Simon Martinez. “Nobody ever thought, when the reservoir was built, that there wouldn’t be enough water to supply the farms that have been put out here. It’s not only us; it’s happening all through southwestern Colorado.”
Low-water years leave their mark. Brush and scrub quickly reclaim unplanted fields. Employees laid off during dry years are hard to replace. During consecutive years of heat and drought, farms that rely on the basin’s many smaller reservoirs become even more vulnerable. As the number of dry years grows, it is increasingly uncertain how much shortage the Ute Mountain Farm and Ranch Enterprise can sustain in the long term, despite the farmers’ determination to adapt.
“We still haven’t thrown the towel in,” said Simon Martinez. “Nobody ever thought, when the reservoir was built, that there wouldn’t be enough water to supply the farms that have been put out here. It’s not only us; it’s happening all through southwestern Colorado.”
Low-water years leave their mark. Brush and scrub quickly reclaim unplanted fields. Employees laid off during dry years are hard to replace. During consecutive years of heat and drought, farms that rely on the basin’s many smaller reservoirs become even more vulnerable. As the number of dry years grows, it is increasingly uncertain how much shortage the Ute Mountain Farm and Ranch Enterprise can sustain in the long term, despite the farmers’ determination to adapt.
Arizona Rivers Map via Geology.com.
When Water Disappears
Hundreds of miles south, Will Clemens manages his uncle’s 2,100-acre farm, cultivating cotton, alfalfa and Bermuda grass. Farmers in this region operate with a year-round growing season punctuated by dust storms and summer monsoons.
In this intense environment, wells were the only water source before Colorado River water became available. Until the 1980s, farmers drew their water from deep underground, contributing to fissures, land subsidence and drying wells. The completion of the Central Arizona Project alleviated the pressure, delivering farmers cheap imported river water that was classified as lower priority and the first to be cut during shortages. Deliveries continued until 2022, when low water levels at Lake Mead triggered federal cuts, and central Arizona farms lost access. In response, Clemens’ local irrigation district drilled a dozen new wells.
Without the river, Clemens and his neighbors have seen the canals’ water drop. At times, their irrigation district will cut off water before a field is fully irrigated, or struggle to keep up with the farmers’ water orders. More pressure on groundwater raises questions about what is sustainable in the future. Large parts of Arizona have no legal limits on pumping water from the ground. Even areas with legally protected groundwater have failed to meet a safe yield goal set in the 1980s to balance groundwater taken each year with naturally replenished water by 2025.
Some central Arizona farmers are selling or leasing their farmland to solar developers, as water dwindles and energy demands grow. Miles up the road from where Clemens farms, sleek black grids of solar panels gleam next to green alfalfa. For years, Arnold Burruel, Clemens’ uncle, has been in talks with a solar developer about selling the land.
“I’ve been asking myself: Does America really need to be in the agriculture industry?” Burruel said. “America is not totally enamored with agriculture when it comes to pesticides, herbicides, groundwater, GMOs — all of the above. We are at a crossroads. Are we going to continue to farm the way we are farming and heavily subsidize growers that can’t make ends meet? Society has to come up with an answer.”
California uses the most water of any state in the Colorado River Basin, partly for its cities along the Pacific Coast but a substantial amount for agriculture in the Imperial Valley. Photo December 2015/Allen Best
When Water is Abundant
From above,the All American Canal forms a stark blue line, slicing through the Algodones Dunes. One of the world’s largest canals, it is fed by the Imperial Dam, which diverts up to 6.8 million gallons of water each minute from the Colorado River.
This is the only water source for 500,000 acres of Imperial Valley farmland. Farms here are protected by senior rights at low risk of cuts and receive regular releases from Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States. During summer months, the sun looms over the valley’s dusty, flat horizon, and temperatures often climb above 100 degrees. Despite decades of drought and growing water shortage, water has flowed uninterrupted to the Imperial Valley.
Fourth-generation family farmer Jack Vessey, who oversees a 10,000-acre produce operation, knows the canal system well. Growing up, he searched for places to swim on hot summer days.
“We take water seriously,” said Vessey, who added sprinkler systems, which are more efficient than flood irrigation. In recent years, the Imperial Irrigation District joined other communities throughout the basin in voluntarily cutting water through 2026 in exchange for federal funds. The district’s compensation was several hundred dollars more per acre-foot than other participants. But as funding set aside for Western water by the Biden administration is drawn down, it is unclear how much will be available to pay for future voluntary cuts.
Vessey is aware of the growing pressure on the river and the valley’s farms, but he emphasizes that the community has helped with shortages and is protective of its water.
“I have a responsibility for the people who work here to make sure we survive,” he said. “I have to be a little selfish at some point and say, ‘Keep giving us the water we need.’ I know we’ve got to do our part, but I can look in the mirror and say we are not wasting water, we are growing food people need.
“If it wasn’t for that canal coming off the Colorado River, this would just turn to desert.”
This project was supported by the National Geographic Society’s World Freshwater Initiative.
Click the link to read the release on the CWCB website:
March 19, 2026
Yesterday, at its March Board Meeting, the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) approved more than $13 million in funding for 48 water projects across the state through its Water Plan Grant and Water Supply Reserve Fund programs, bringing the totals for the fiscal year to more than $40 million for 136 locally-driven projects across the state. These advance critical efforts to help communities be more prepared for drought and wildfires, improve water resilience, and secure Colorado’s water future.
“Organizations across the state are implementing these projects to do their part in moving Colorado’s Water Plan Partner Actions forward,” said CWCB Director Lauren Ris. “These locally driven efforts—from agricultural producers to municipalities to watershed groups—demonstrate a collective commitment to building a resilient, and water-wise future. The importance of this work is underscored by worsening drought conditions. We are putting efforts to protect water resources front and center.”
The funding reflects both the urgency of Colorado’s current water challenges and the overwhelming demand for resources. Funding requests far exceeded available dollars, highlighting the volume of high-impact projects ready for implementation across the state.
These investments are made possible through sports betting taxes in Colorado, a funding stream that continues to play a critical role in advancing Colorado’s water priorities.
“This level of demand for our Water Plan Grants shows just how much water users across Colorado rely on these investments,” said Colorado Department of Natural Resources Executive Director Dan Gibbs. “It also speaks to the incredible work happening on the ground to conserve water and build more resilient systems that will serve communities and our water resources for generations to come.”
Funded projects reflect key priorities of the Colorado Water Plan, including water conservation, wildfire resilience, and water storage. This includes projects focused on conserving water and improving efficiency, such as funding for new Water Efficiency Plans—an essential tool for long-term water supply planning—as well as initiatives like urban turf replacement, resilient school landscapes with smart irrigation, and comprehensive outdoor water budgeting.
The CWCB also continues to invest in projects that help communities prepare for wildfire impacts through watershed restoration and implementation of Wildfire Ready Action Plans, helping protect critical water resources from post-fire risks.
And in Colorado’s current warm, low-snowpack water year, investments in water storage are critical. Funding this grant cycle supports projects that increase or evaluate storage capacity—an essential strategy for capturing and managing water when supplies are limited. These efforts include feasibility studies and improvements to reservoirs and dams in communities across the state.
Finally, the Water Supply Reserve Fund grant investments this grant cycle includes projects such as post-fire diversion infrastructure improvements in Rio Blanco County and enhanced groundwater monitoring efforts in the South Platte Basin—both of which strengthen local water resilience and inform long-term water management.
This week, a powerful storm system crossed from the Great Plains into the Great Lakes, bringing widespread rain and thunderstorms to parts of the Midwest, and a historic blizzard to portions of the Upper Midwest, especially in northern Wisconsin and Michigan near Lake Superior. Total precipitation amounts exceeded 2 inches in a large area of the western Great Lakes, while lighter amounts, mostly 0.5-3 inches of precipitation, fell across parts of the southern and eastern Contiguous U.S. Improvements to ongoing drought and dryness occurred across large portions of the Midwest, parts of the lower Mississippi River Valley, and in the Northeast outside of northern New England. Heavy rain and, in some areas, mountain snow, fell across parts of the Northwest, locally improving drought conditions. However, significant deficits in snow still exist in many parts of the West, including the Pacific Northwest, which limited the longer-term benefits of the precipitation that fell. Much of the Southwest, and the central and southern Great Plains, missed out on precipitation, and instead dealt with a dry, warm and windy week. Precipitation deficits, and lack of snowpack in the mountains, continued to worsen amid high evaporative demand, leading to widespread worsening of abnormal dryness and drought, especially in South Dakota and Nebraska, southwest Kansas, southern Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and parts of Oregon that missed out on precipitation. A kona low delivered heavy precipitation to all of Hawaii this week, leading to widespread 1- and local 2-category improvements to ongoing drought conditions from Molokai eastward…
In the southern half of the High Plains region, warmer-than-normal weather continued this week amid mainly dry and frequently windy conditions. Degradation in drought conditions was widespread across Nebraska and southern parts of South Dakota. A deadly wildfire in western Nebraska, the Morrill Fire, has burned a record amount of land for Nebraska wildfires. This fire, and others across Nebraska, occurred amid weather conditions favorable for fire growth and a background of worsening drought conditions. The Great Plains of southwest Kansas and southeast Colorado also saw worsening drought and abnormal dryness this week, as precipitation deficits continued to mount along with warmer-than-normal temperatures this winter and early spring. Large precipitation deficits and above-normal evaporative demand over the last several months led to extreme drought development in parts of the Black Hills in southwest South Dakota. Colder temperatures and some precipitation kept conditions unchanged (and mostly free of drought or abnormal dryness) in North Dakota and northern South Dakota…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending March 17, 2026.
Current drought conditions in the West continued to be headlined by snow drought this week. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains and portions of the San Juan Mountains in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico saw widespread worsening conditions this week. Overall dry and warm conditions worsened both precipitation deficits and snowpack conditions in these areas. Some snow-water monitoring sites in the region have seen near-full or full melting of snowpack. Degradations to ongoing drought and dryness were also widespread in Arizona this week, where warmer-than-normal temperatures combined with dry weather to worsen short-term precipitation deficits, increase evaporative demand and support low streamflow levels. High-elevation parts of Arizona that usually have snow on the ground in mid-March are also suffering from snow drought. This combination of drier- and warmer-than-normal weather and snow drought may set the state for drought conditions to worsen in the coming weeks if weather conditions remain warm and dry. Warmer-than-normal and dry weather occurred this week in Nevada, worsening conditions in some areas, especially in the north, where impacts are being reported as a result of unusually warm and dry weather over the last several months and meagre mountain snow. Due to locally heavy precipitation or lack thereof, a mix of small-scale improvements and degradations occurred in Oregon. Amid the snow drought, localized degradations occurred in southwest Idaho, while heavier mountain snows improved snowpack in some mountain ranges in parts of western Montana, leading to localized improvements. The effectiveness of this locally renewed snowpack in improving soil moisture will be analyzed further in the weeks ahead…
This week, parts of east Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee benefitted from localized rains of at least 2 inches. Elsewhere, deep south Texas, western Texas, and northern and western Oklahoma were mostly dry this week. Temperatures across the region were warmer than normal, with readings varying widely from a degree or two above normal to 9-12 degrees above normal. Soil moisture levels improved and precipitation shortfalls lessened in parts of east-central Texas, Louisiana and southeast Arkansas, leading to localized improvements to drought conditions in these areas. Despite heavier rains, a small area of extreme drought shifted northeast in southeast Tennessee due to very large precipitation deficits that continued this week. Growing short-term precipitation deficits led to the development of severe drought in a small area of northwest Tennessee. Heavy rain in Dallas improved local conditions. Warm, dry and windy conditions were the rule elsewhere in the southern Great Plains and deep south Texas, leading to localized degradations in central and northern Texas, deep south Texas, south-central and northwest Oklahoma, and the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles…
Looking Ahead
Through the evening of Monday, March 23, the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center’s forecast depicts mostly dry weather across a large swath of the Contiguous U.S. Precipitation totaling 0.5-1 inch may fall from West Virginia into New York, and in spots in New England. Similar precipitation amounts are forecast in parts of northwest Montana and the Idaho Panhandle. Western Washington is forecast to receive widespread precipitation amounts of at least 1 inch, with some favored mountainous areas forecast to receive 2.5-5 inches of precipitation (or locally more). Elsewhere, the forecast calls for precipitation amounts to remain at or below 0.5 inches, with most of the Great Plains, Mississippi and Lower Ohio River Valleys, and the Gulf Coast states likely to remain completely dry.
Looking ahead from March 24-28, the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center forecast strongly favors warmer-than-normal temperatures in most of the West, especially in the Southwest, and across much of the Great Plains and South. Near- or below-normal temperatures are favored from northern North Dakota eastward through the Great Lakes into much of the Northeast. Above-normal precipitation is favored in Washington, northern Oregon, the Idaho Panhandle and northwest Montana, and from northern Michigan eastward across the northern half of the Northeast. Wetter-than-normal weather is also forecast in central and southern Florida. Elsewhere in the contiguous United States, below-normal precipitation is more likely, especially from the Great Plains to Utah, Nevada, the Desert Southwest and California.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending March 17, 2026.
