Mountain snowmelt is the lifeblood of the Great Salt Lake, providing the vast majority of its fresh water. On average the mountains around the lake contribute approximately 1.9 to 2.1 million acre-feet of surface runoff annually.1 However on February first of this year – with Utah’s snowpack in near record-poor condition, Utah’s Natural Resources Conservation Service released a report that forecast a reduction in snowmelt that ranges from 21% to 77% of average.2
This (potentially) dramatic drop in snowmelt forces our attention to the Great Salt Lake’s other major source of water, the Bear River, and there the news is equally alarming. The Bear River in Utah faces a variety of environmental threats primarily from human activities like agriculture, water management, and development. These impact water quality, habitats, and flows into the Great Salt Lake. The following list of challenges the river faces are ranked in order of prevalence and severity, from reports like wetland studies and conservation plans.3
Clusters of microbialites, potentially thousands of years old, are endangered by The Great Salt Lake’s declining water levels and the water’s rising salinity. Video by Robert Marcos.
Water Diversions: Proposed and existing diversions, such as the Bear River Development project, threaten to reduce flows by up to 220,000 acre-feet annually, lowering Great Salt Lake levels by 8.5-14 inches and exposing lakebed dust with toxins like arsenic. This exacerbates drought effects and harms migratory birds reliant on Bear River Bay wetlands.4
Agricultural Runoff: Runoff from intensive farming affects 83% of wetlands, delivering excess nutrients, sediments, and pollutants that cause eutrophication, algal blooms, and oxygen depletion. The Bear River is impaired throughout the study area due to these inputs, worsened by upstream sources in Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming.5
Hydrologic Alteration: Dams, irrigation, and impoundments alter flow timing and flooding, impacting nearly all wetlands and degrading riparian habitats. Reservoirs like Cutler divert spring runoff, leading to inconsistent river flows and wetland desiccation.6
Invasive Species: Non-native plants like Phragmites australis cover 11% of wetlands, outcompeting natives and reducing biodiversity, especially in disturbed mudflats. Agricultural species such as foxtail and clover invade via forage planting.7
Sediment and Pollution: Erosion from tributaries and livestock causes siltation, while point sources (69% of wetlands) and nanoparticles from boat paints add contaminants. Legacy issues like high alkalinity and industrial wastes persist.8
A photo of Glen Canyon Dam from 2022, when the dam’s intake points were 33 feet away from minimum power pool. The top of the grate-like penstocks can be seen in this photo. Luna Anna Archey / High Country News
Floyd Dominy, the commissioner of the federal Bureau of Reclamation in the 1960s, was largely responsible for the construction of Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River. In 1963, when the dam was completed, he could not have foreseen the climate situation we find ourselves in today, with declining snowpack, record-high temperatures and alarmingly low water levels in Lake Powell, year after year. But he and his engineers could have, and should have, foreseen that the way they designed the dam would leave little room to maneuver should a water-supply crisis ever impact the river and its watershed.
Indeed, a state of crisis has been building on the Colorado for decades, even as the parties that claim its water argue over how to divide its rapidly diminishing flows. Lately, things have entered a new and perilous phase. Last Nov. 11 was a long-awaited deadline: Either the states involved — California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming — would have to agree on a new management plan, or else the federal government would impose its own, something none of the parties would welcome. Meanwhile, the 30 tribes that also hold claims to the river have historically been and continue to be excluded from these negotiations.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
That deadline came and went, and instead of acting, the government punted, this time to Feb. 14. Nobody was surprised: Unmet deadlines and empty ultimatums have been business as usual on the river for years. Decades of falling reservoir levels and clear warnings from scientists about global warming and drought have prompted much hand-wringing and some temporary conservation measures, but little in the way of permanent change in how water is used in the Colorado River Basin.
The downstream face of Glen Canyon Dam, which forms Lake Powell, America’s second-largest water reservoir. Water is released from the reservoir through a hydropower generation system at the base of the dam. Photo by Brian Richter
For decades, the seven Basin states have used more water than the river delivers by drawing their entitlements from surpluses banked in reservoirs during the wet 1980s and ’90s, chiefly in Lake Mead and Lake Powell. Never mind that those entitlements were based on an over-estimate of river flows in 1922, when the Colorado River Compact was established, rendering the “paper” water of the entitlements essentially a fiction, not to mention a source of continual conflict. That savings account has now been drained: Mead and Powell are each below 30% full, and the trend is steadily downward. Global warming has only accelerated the decline: So far this century, the river’s flow has fallen 20% from its long-term annual averages, and scientists forecast more of the same as the climate continues to heat up.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
Meanwhile, the physical infrastructure that enables Colorado River water management is on the verge of its own real and potentially catastrophic crisis — and yet Reclamation has barely acknowledged this, with the exception of an oblique reference in an unposted technical memorandum from 2024. The falling reservoir levels reveal another, deeper set of problems inside Glen Canyon Dam, which holds back the Colorado and Lake Powell. The 710-foot-tall dam was designed for a Goldilocks world in which water levels would never be too high or too low, despite the well-known fact that the Colorado is by far the most variable river in North America, prone to prodigious floods and extended droughts. But the Bureau, bursting with Cold War confidence — or hubris — chose to downplay the threat. In the record-breaking El Niño winter of 1983, the Bureau almost lost the dam to overtopping, due to both its mismanagement and its design, because the dam lacks sufficient spillway capacity for big floods. Only sheets of plywood installed across its top and cooler temperatures that slowed the melting of that year’s snowpack saved Glen Canyon Dam.
The four 96-inch diameter steel pipes of the River Outlet Works. If the dam’s penstocks are closed, these pipes are the only remaining way to pass water through the dam, and are unsafe to use for extended intervals. Luna Anna Archey / High Country News
Gus Levy, Glen Canyon Dam’s plant facility manager, walks past hydropower turbines. In 2022, due to the low water level of Lake Powell, only five of the eight turbines operated on a daily basis, though all eight were kept in working order. Luna Anna Archey / High Country News
Today, the dam is threatened not by too much water but too little. In March 2023, the water level of Lake Powell dropped to within 30 feet of the minimum required for power generation, known as “minimum power pool.” At 3,490 feet above sea level, minimum power pool is 20 feet above the generators’ actual intakes, or penstocks, but the dam’s eight turbines must be shut down at minimum power pool to avoid cavitation — when air is sucked down like a whirlpool into the penstocks, forming explosive bubbles which can cause massive failure inside the dam.
Even more worrisome is what would happen next. At minimum power pool, the penstocks would have to be closed, and the only remaining way to pass water through the dam is the river outlet works, or ROWs: two intakes in the rear face of the dam leading to four 96-inch-diameter steel pipes with a combined maximum discharge capacity of 15,000 cubic feet per second. However, the ROWs, also known as bypass tubes, have a serious design flaw: They are unsafe to use for extended intervals, and start to erode when the reservoir is low.
In 2023, when the ROWs were used to conduct a high-flow release into the Grand Canyon at low-reservoir levels, there was, in fact, damaging cavitation, and the Bureau has warned that there would likely be more in the event of their extended use. In practice, safe releases downstream may only be a fraction of their claimed capacity — and if the tubes begin to experience cavitation, flows may need to be cut off entirely. Such a scenario would compromise the dam’s legal downstream delivery requirements, or, to put it bluntly, its ability to deliver enough water to the 25 million people downstream who rely on it — as well as the billions of dollars’ worth of agriculture involved. This means that Lake Powell — and with it, the entire Colorado River system — is perilously close to operational failure.
If reservoir levels drop to the ROWs’ elevation of 3,370 feet above sea level, Lake Powell would reach “dead pool,” where water would pass through the dam only when the river’s flow exceeded the amount of water lost to evaporation from the reservoir. No other intakes nor spillways exist below the ROWs. There is no “drain plug.” Yet there is more dam — 240 feet more before the bottom of the reservoir, effectively the old riverbed. This not-insignificant impoundment — about 1.7 million acre-feet of water — would be trapped, stagnant and heating in the sun, prone to algal blooms and deadly anoxia. The lake would rise and fall wildly, as much as 100 feet in a season, because of the martini-glass shape of Lake Powell’s vertical cross section.
Illustration from the report, <a href=”https://utahrivers.org/blog-post/2022/8/9/lenapost“>Antique Plumbing & Leadership Postponed</a> from the Utah Rivers Council, Glen Canyon Institute and the Great Basin Water Network. Courtesy of Utah Rivers Council
Insufficient or no flows through Glen Canyon Dam would be a disaster of unprecedented magnitude, affecting vast population centers and some of the biggest economies in the world, not to mention ecosystems that depend on the river all the way to the Gulf of California in Mexico. The Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada warned as much in a recent letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, saying that Reclamation’s failure to mention the dam’s plumbing problems in its current environmental impact statement for post-2026 operations is against federal law. The letter reads: “Addressing the infrastructure limitations may be the one long-term measure that would best achieve operation and management improvements to the Glen Canyon Dam.”
To date, however, the Bureau has made no formal response.
One thing is clear: Glen Canyon Dam will need to be modified to meet its legal and operational requirements. In the process, the health of the ecosystems in Glen Canyon, above the dam, and in Grand Canyon, below it, must be considered. The best way to avoid operational failure and the economic and ecological disasters that would follow is to re-engineer the dam to allow the river to run through it or around it at river level, transporting its natural sediment load into the Grand Canyon.
Sketches by Floyd Dominy show the way he’d end the Glen Canyon Dam. From the article “Floyd Dominy built the Glen Canyon Dam, then he sketched its end on a napkin” on the Salt Lake Tribune
As it happens, Floyd Dominy himself provided us with a simple and elegant plan for how to do it. In 1997, the former commissioner sketched on a cocktail napkin how new bypass tunnels could be drilled through the soft sandstone around the dam and outfitted with waterproof valves to control the flow of water and sediment. What it prescribes is treating the patient — the Colorado River, now on life support — with open-heart surgery, a full bypass. Dominy’s napkin, which he signed and gave to my colleague Richard Ingebretsen, the founder of Glen Canyon Institute, is effectively a blueprint for a healthier future for the Colorado River and the people and ecosystems that depend on it.
But the window for action to avoid dead pool is dauntingly narrow and closing fast, especially given the time that would likely be required for the government to study, design and implement a fix. The Trump administration’s gutting of federal agency expertise and capacity adds yet more urgency to the issue. Whatever may or may not get decided on Feb. 14, the feds and the basin states need to look beyond the water wars and start building a lasting, sustainable future on the Colorado River.
The seven states that take water from the Colorado River have a deadline of February 14 to come up with a river management plan that they can all agree on. And every day that passes it looks as if that deadline, not the first one they have faced, will also be missed. Valentines Day may not be one of shared love by all.
The Colorado River basin is experiencing the greatest drought and loss of flows in the past 1200 years and the various agreements crafted to deal with deepening drought, particularly the 2007 Interim Guidelines and subsequent Drought Contingency Plans, are set to expire at the end of this year.
The major sticking point is centered around how water diversions from the river will be cut, and there will be substantial cuts. Most of that burden will fall on the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada. They are the largest users of Colorado River water. Cuts for the four Upper Basin states; Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico are not considered in either the previous guideline and agreements nor in the recently released Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for Post-2026 Operational Guidelines and Strategies for Lake Powell and Lake Mead by the Bureau of Reclamation. The DEIS only looks at the river below the upper reaches of Lake Powell.
This has the Lower Basin up in arms. They are demanding mandatory, verifiable and enforceable cuts by the river diversions in the Upper Basin. The Upper Basin is refusing this demand, and Arizona in particular is threatening to unleash its historical use of litigation to try and get what it wants.
Underlying this, however, is a very fundamental misunderstanding of how water diversions work between the Lower and Upper Basins. I’m starting to think that misunderstanding is deliberate, primarily to mislead the public constituents within the Lower Basin states. [ed. emphasis mine]
Tom Buschatzke, director of Arizona’s Department of Water Resources, has said, “We need certainty there are reductions in upper basin usage because that is one of the two tools that we have… You can’t make it snow or rain. But you can reduce your demand”.
But in the Upper Basin that is not as easy as it sounds.
I have read that the true skill of a good negotiator is in being able to truly understand the other sides position. There are skilled and knowledgeable negotiators in the Lower basin, but I don’t think that they truly understand the Upper Basins position. They have been accustomed, some would say addicted, to the reliable delivery of stored water for all their needs since Hoover Dam was built and began releasing stored water some 90 years ago. Only until very recently, even in the face of an unrelenting drought, have they had to deal with shortages. For the Upper Basin shortage is an annual reality.
The Lower Basin takes water from the Colorado River mainly through a small handful of very large diversions such as the All American Canal, which provides water for Imperial and Coachella Valley agriculture, the Central Arizona Project (CAP) providing water for Pheonix, Tucson, Tribes, and Arizona agriculture and the California Aqueduct, which provides water for Los Angeles, San Diego and most Southern California cities. While distribution from these few large diversions to individual contract uses may be complicated by drought, reducing the intake at their diversion points isn’t.
That situation is very different in the Upper Basin. In Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico there are many thousands of small diversions taking water from the Colorado River, the Green River and their myriad headwater tributaries. There are a few large diversions in the Upper Basin, primarily for water taken out of the basin to Colorado’s East Slope cities and farms and to Utah’s Wasatch Front, but these diversions are still quite small compared to those in the Lower Basin.
The largest reservoirs in the Upper Basin are those built through the Colorado River Storage Act (CRSP, 1956), such as Flaming Gorge, Blue Mesa and Navajo. These reservoirs were not built to supply Upper Basin water needs, but to provide a “bank account” for Colorado River Compact compliance. In other words, for the benefit of the Lower Basin. Releases from these reservoirs are contemplated in the Post-2026 DEIS to maintain water elevations in Lake Powell that protect vital dam infrastructure and hydropower generation.
Lake Powell is also an Upper Basin reservoir in the CRSP Act of 1956. It was built entirely for Compact compliance and water deliveries to the Lower Basin. It has no water supply benefit to the Upper Basin other than as a Compact savings account.
A major wrinkle in any mandatory curtailments in Upper Basin diversions is simply in administrative logistics. It would be a complete nightmare for water administration and the State water engineers offices. And in Colorado it would be in the Water Courts as well.
A little legal background is needed here as well.
See Article 6.
All of the Colorado Basin states have Prior Appropriation as the bedrock doctrine for their water laws. California has a bit of a mix with Riparian law, but as far as the Colorado River diversions are concerned prior appropriation rules. Prior appropriation is the doctrine of “first in time, first in right” to divert the available water. Colorado was the first to codify prior appropriation in its state constitution, in 1876. Article 16, Section 6:
“The right to divert the unappropriated waters of any natural stream to beneficial uses shall never be denied. Priority of appropriation shall give the better right as between those using the water for the same purpose; but when the waters of any natural stream are not sufficient for the service of all those desiring the use of the same, those using the water for domestic purposes shall have the preference over those claiming for any other purpose, and those using the water for agricultural purposes shall have preference over those using the same for manufacturing purposes.“
In Colorado you don’t actually need a court decreed right to divert water to a beneficial use. Just a shovel and a ditch. However, you are still subject to prior appropriation and can be the first cut off if a call is placed on the stream. There are a lot of such small diversions without an adjudicated right. I used to water my lawn in Eagle that way.
The Colorado River Compact of 1922 was created to avoid prior appropriation between the states. The US Supreme Court had decided that when there is a dispute over water between States that held prior appropriation as their foundational water law, seniority applies across state lines. Southern California was starting to grow at a much more rapid pace than the other states, greatly alarming the headwater, Upper Basin states. The Compact was crafted so that water from the river could be allocated “equitably”, allowing each state to grow and develop its water at its own pace. The Compact became the foundation of what is now known as the Law of the River. Laws based on prior appropriation still govern water use and administration within each State.
Arizona and California began arguing and litigating almost immediately, with Arizona usually on the losing end. That changed in 1963 when the US Supreme Court handed down a decision that once and for all set the water allocations for the Lower Basin, based on the allocations created in the 1928 Boulder Canyon Project Act, which finally ratified the Compact and paved the way for Hoover Dam, Lake Mead and the All American Canal.
Then the seniority picture between states changed with the passage of the 1968 Colorado River Projects Act that authorized construction of Arizona’s long fought for dream of the Central Arizona Project. To get passage, Arizona had to subordinate its water rights to California, making it the junior and first to take cuts in times of drought.
Upper Colorado River Basin map via the Upper Colorado River Commission.
None of that extended into the Upper Basin, where the States had been getting along just fine, mostly, since the Compact was signed. These four states drafted their own Upper Colorado River Basin Compact in 1948, mainly so they could get more money from the Federal Government to build water storage and delivery projects. They did something novel, allocating each states share by a percentage of the rivers flow, not by set volumes of water as the 1922 Compact had done.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
Everything was fine so long as the major reservoirs of Lakes Mead and Powell were full. That has changed considerably since the onset of the current mega, or Millennial drought began in 2000. The two reservoirs have dropped to very low levels, levels never anticipated or planned for.
Here is the crux of the matter. The Lower Basin is demanding mandatory cuts from Upper Basin uses so that more water can flow downstream for their use. The 1922 Compact says clearly that the Upper Basin states “will not cause the river flow at Lee Ferry to be depleted below and aggregate of 75,000,000 acre feet for any period of ten consecutive years…”. The Lower Basin states argue that this constitutes an “obligation” to deliver that much water to them. The Upper Basin states say no, there is no delivery obligation. It is a non-depletion requirement, that through diversions and actual consumption the states can’t let those flows drop below 75 million acre feet (maf) in a ten year running average.
That has never been a problem, until now. The 1922 Compact and its non-depletion requirement is a priority right in itself. Any water right in the Upper Basin that was adjudicated, perfected by actual use and consumption, after 1922 is subject to curtailment for fulfilling the non-depletion requirement. Any and all rights perfected prior to November 1922 are exempt.
So far, as of 2026, the required flows over a ten year running average have not yet hit that non-depletion trigger of 75 maf running average over ten years. Not yet, but it could be getting close.
The Upper Basin states live by a “run of the river” system as there are no large storage units dedicated to their use as the Lower Basin has with Powell and Mead. There are many small reservoirs used for a single irrigation season, filled with the spring runoff and then empty by the end of the growing season. But they also are subject to how much water comes in the spring and downstream senior calls.
Every year, especially since this mega drought and increased aridification began, Upper Basin irrigators are curtailed each summer as the streams shrink and the small reservoirs are drained. Some years this curtailment includes water rights that are senior to the Compact as well.
The Upper basin, in short, is forced to live within its means, with what it has and no more than Mother Nature provides with the winter snowpack. As Tom Buschatzke said, “You can’t make it snow or rain. But you can reduce your demand”. The Upper Basin does exactly that every year, especially in years like this with a record low snowpack.
The mandatory, verifiable and enforceable cuts demanded by the Lower Basin would be more than difficult to achieve. And again, it would be an administrative and legal nightmare for those assigned the task on the thousands of relatively small, individual diversions that make up the Upper Basin’s water use from the Colorado River. There are those larger trans-basin diversions to the Colorado East Slope and cities, but even if they took substantial cuts, it would still be a pretty small amount of water. No where near the amounts that the Lower Basin has become accustomed to.
Right now the Upper Basin uses roughly half their Compact allocation, roughly around 4 maf a year, while the Lower Basin has historically used more than their full Compact allocation. To their credit, the Lower Basin has made substantial cuts, some voluntary and some enforced by agreements and obligations. California was forced to cut their water use by 800,000 acre-feet with the 2007 Interim Guidelines, back to their actual decreed limit, a cut some claim as an example of how much “sacrifice” they have made. They and Arizona have made additional cuts as well, now taking around 6 maf, from a historic high near 10 maf per year.
I agree that the Upper basin needs to work harder at conservation, and they have been trying hard over the last few years. They haven’t been hording water or ignoring the needs of the Lower Basin or those spelled out in the Compact and subsequent agreements as some in the Lower Basin claim. But “mandatory” cuts beyond those already happening each and every summer will require significant changes with state water law and administration. In Colorado’s case it could well require a change to Article 16, Section Six, of the state’s constitution which has held unaltered since 1876.
We live now in a very different world from the 1800’s and 1922 when the Compact was drafted, using highly optimistic flow calculations that they already knew were wrong. But the men who drafted it were boosters, as were their fathers, seeing the West as they wanted to, not as it really was. America’s westward expansion has always been driven by dreams of abundance, and for a while the river was able to provide that through massive engineering, a still small but growing population and some pretty wet years. Many still hold on to that misguided dream of abundance in an increasingly arid region.
That has all evaporated. All water users in the West, especially the Colorado River basin, expect certainty and reliability, as Tom Buschatzke declared. We’ve built an entire system, and an entire economy based on those principals. Certainty and reliability are now fading rapidly in the rear view mirror, if we dare to look. Many won’t. The Colorado River has made the desert bloom and let us build great cities. But its dwindling supply is placing all that in jeopardy. We need to adapt. The only certain and reliable future is one with less water, greater aridity and warmer and much drier climate.
Maybe our great civilization built on a desert river will go the way of the Hohokam who filled the valley Pheonix now inhabits with irrigation canals and a thriving population. Maybe. We can change that scenario if we adapt to the new reality. That will be both hard and painful. Parochial self-interest must be balanced with regional ties and interests, and that is never easy. Nor is it politically palatable. The Lower Basin is railing against the Upper Basin’s refusal to provide water it just doesn’t have. The Upper Basin is living within its means while honoring its commitments to the Compact as best it can.
The Bureau of Reclamation in its DEIS for Post-2026 river management introduced a new concept, at least new for Colorado River management. Decision making under Deep Uncertainty, or DMDU. Many, seemingly, aren’t familiar with that concept. Even the Bureau’s recommendations may not go far enough with that concept. They don’t seriously engage the reality that both Powell and Mead are headed for deadpool, meaning that the only water available from either reservoir will be what flows in. There will be no storage to rely on. None. That will have far more devastating impacts than what any of the alternatives contemplate. [ed. emphasis mine]
But when the well runs dry there isn’t much we can do. A few years ago the concept of stationarity in climate norms, basing predictions within the parameters of historical extremes, was declared dead. The ideas of certainty and reliability are now headed for the same graveyard.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Click the link to read the assessment on the NOAA website:
February 11, 2026
January Highlights:
The global surface temperature was the fifth-warmest January on record—the smallest temperature departure since 2023.
Snow cover extent was below average for North America and near average for Eurasia.
Sea ice extent was near record low for the Arctic and below average for Antarctica.
Global tropical cyclone activity was above normal with 11 named storms.
Map of global notable weather and climate anomalies and events in January 2026.
Temperature
January 2025 ranked as the fifth-warmest January in NOAA’s 177-year record, with a global surface temperature 2.02°F (1.12°C) higher than the 20th-century baseline. All 10 of the warmest Januarys on record have occurred since 2007, with the most recent five years (2022–26) among the top 10.
Land and Ocean Temperature Percentiles for January 2026. Red indicates warmer than average and blue indicates colder than average.
In January 2026, unusually high temperatures prevailed across much of the Earth’s surface. The most notable high temperature departures were observed across the Arctic, Greenland, the western U.S., Canada, Africa, southern and eastern Asia and parts of Australia, where temperature departures were at least 3.6°F (2.0°C) above average. Several regions across the globe experienced their warmest January on record, including parts of Greenland, Africa, Asia, the Atlantic and parts of the Pacific and Southern Oceans. Notably, Africa experienced its warmest January on record, while North America, South America and Oceania had a top 10 warm January.
In contrast, notable below-average temperatures were observed in Alaska, the eastern U.S., Europe, northern Asia and across parts of Antarctica and the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. However, no land or ocean areas experienced record-cold January temperatures.
Snow Cover
In January 2026, snow cover extent across North America and Greenland was 150,000 square miles below average, tying with 2002 for the 12th-smallest January extent on record. Meanwhile, Eurasia saw near-average coverage at 11.48 million square miles. Overall, Northern Hemisphere snow cover for January was slightly below average at 18.12 million square miles.
Regionally, snow deficits were most pronounced across the western half of the contiguous U.S. and central Asia extending into China. In contrast, above-average snow cover was observed in the south-central U.S. extending towards the Northeast, central and eastern Europe, Japan and parts of northern and northeastern China.
Sea Ice
Global sea ice extent was the fifth smallest for January in the historical record at 550,000 square miles below the 1991–2020 average. The Arctic sea ice extent was below average by 340,000 square miles, tying with 2025 as the second-smallest January extent in the 48-year record. The Antarctic sea ice extent for January was the 13th smallest at 210,000 square miles below average.
Map of the Antarctic (left) and the Arctic (right) sea ice extent in January 2026.
Tropical Cyclones
Global tropical cyclone activity in January was above normal, producing 11 named storms. Four of these reached tropical cyclone strength, and two intensified into major tropical cyclones. Most of the activity occurred in the Southern Hemisphere (South Indian, Australian and Southwest Pacific basins), with one named storm in the West Pacific. No storms formed in the North Atlantic, East Pacific or North Indian basins, which is typical during January.
Notably, Tropical Cyclone Fytia, in the Southern Indian basin, made landfall in northern Madagascar at the end of the month as a strong cyclone, bringing heavy rainfall and widespread flooding. The storm caused at least 12 deaths, displaced thousands and damaged or destroyed thousands of homes.
More than 8,500 daily heat records have been tied or broken in the West this winter. "I have not seen a winter like this," said NSIDC director Mark Serreze, who has been in Colorado almost 40 years. "This pattern that we're in is so darned persistent." https://t.co/nn3WylQ9uL
The Gold King Mine spill happened on August 5, 2015, when EPA contractors accidentally released approximately 3 million gallons of contaminated wastewater into Cement Creek – a tributary of the Animas River in Colorado. The plume, containing heavy metals, flowed into the Animas and San Juan rivers. 1 The USGS – in cooperation with the EPA, gathered streamgage data in order to confirm the origin of the stream flow spike at Cement Creek and the volume of the spike estimated at three million gallons. USGS also took water and sediment samples and provided both current and historical water quality data to EPA.2
Four months later during her address to a House Committee on Natural Resources, the Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell said, “As is so often the case, it is unfortunate that an incident like this has to happen to highlight an issue that land managers in both the state and federal governments have been grappling with for years – that addressing abandoned mine lands is a nationwide problem, and mitigating toxic substances released from many of them is a significant undertaking. Abandoned mine lands are located on private, state, federal, and tribal lands. There aretens of thousands of abandoned hardrock sites on federal lands alone. Many of these abandoned mine land sites were mined prior to the implementation of federal surface management environmental laws that require reclamation and remediation to take place. For those mine sites where no viable potentially responsible party can be determined, the federal government, and ultimately the taxpayer, often bears the burden of addressing these threats to public safety, human health, the environment, and wildlife, rather than the entities that developed and profited from the operations.”3
In 2018 the U.S. Geological Survey, the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and National Park Service, initiated the Lake Powell Coring Project.4 Its purpose was to retrieve and analyze hydraulic piston cores from Lake Powell sediments—primarily targeting the San Juan River delta—to reconstruct the history of sediment and contaminant deposition, including assessing whether material from the 2015 Gold King Mine spill had been sequestered there. Cores taken from 40 holes penetrated up to the pre-Glen Canyon Dam surface to evaluate metal concentrations, distribution, and bioavailability for water quality impacts.5
Preliminary results shared by USGS scientists in late 2021 shared significant findings: while the 2015 Gold King Mine spill caused detectable spikes in lead and zinc, much larger and “more concerning” spikes wereidentified from mining waste disasters that occurred in the 1970s. The following contaminants were found in core samples:6
Lead: Found in significant spikes, particularly in deeper sediment layers corresponding to mid-20th-century mining disasters.
Zinc: Often found in conjunction with lead; used as a primary indicator of mine waste runoff.
Arsenic: A major concern in the San Juan River delta, often naturally occurring but concentrated by mining processes.
Cadmium: A toxic metal frequently associated with zinc mining that was identified in the core samples.
Copper: Present in the sediment, reflecting the region’s extensive copper mining history.
Mercury: Studied due to its ability to bioaccumulate in the food chain (fish), though much of the mercury in the system is attributed to atmospheric deposition and older mining practices.
Now as Lake Powell’s water levels continue to recede amid prolonged drought and heavy upstream water use, vast expanses of toxic sediments—laden with heavy metals like arsenic, cadmium, copper, mercury, lead, selenium, and zinc from historical mining discharges including the 2015 Gold King spill—are increasingly exposed. This drying creates a heightened risk of human exposure through direct contact during boating, fishing, or shoreline recreation, as well as inhalation of windblown dust carrying bioavailable toxins, potentially leading to respiratory issues, skin irritation, and chronic health effects with repeated exposure. Without expanded monitoring or mitigation measures, these once-submerged hazards now pose an urgent public safety threat to the millions of annual visitors in this popular Southwestern reservoir. 7
Denver Water depends on mountain snowpack for 90% of its water supply, which serves 1.5 million people in Denver and surrounding suburbs.
Snowpack as of Feb. 9, 2026, was near record lows: The Colorado River Basin within Denver Water’s collection system was at 55% of normal. The South Platte River Basin within Denver Water’s collection area was 42% of normal. In Denver Water’s decades of records for its watershed collection areas, as of Feb. 9, the Colorado River snowpack ranked among the worst, and the South Platte River snowpack ranked the worst.
No matter what, Denver Water’s annual summer watering rules will always be in place during the irrigation season. And, it is possible that we will need to implement additional drought response measures this year. Denver Water’s response to drought conditions uses a tiered approach, including the potential for additional watering restrictions, in order to preserve water supplies. Denver Water will move closer to developing recommendations for its Board of Water Commissioners on a potential drought response over the next couple of months.
Since 2000, Denver Water’s response to dry conditions in previous years included issuing a Drought Watch (voluntary restrictions) in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2012 and 2013. In some of those years (2002, 2003, 2004, 2013), Denver Water levied additional drought restrictions as part of declaring a Stage 1 level response, which required mandatory reductions in outdoor water use.
Denver Water snowpack update for Feb. 9, 2026
Conditions remain highly concerning. Poor snowfall combined with warm temperatures have left us roughly 4 feet of snow short of where we’d prefer to be in the Denver Water collection area.
Reservoir storage conditions are below average, but in reasonably good shape: 81% full versus an average of 85% full for this time. Those levels are also artificially affected by the need to keep Gross Reservoir low during construction to raise the dam, a project designed to increase the storage capacity of the reservoir.
Denver Water has been here several times over roughly 50 years of reliable records. On the positive side, we have experienced years that started dry and conditions dramatically improved in March, April and May. This year, however, we are running out of time to build a healthy winter base.
No matter what, Denver Water’s annual summer watering rules will always be in place during the irrigation season. Additional drought restrictions, voluntary or mandatory, will depend in part on how the rest of the snow season shapes up and will be aimed at preserving water supplies in case this unusually dry stretch deepens into a multiyear drought.
Comment from Nathan Elder, Denver Water’s manager of water supply:
“We are running out of winter. Conditions are highly concerning, and as we continue to hope for relief in the spring months, we also are preparing recommendations for our drought response. We encourage customers to think about conservation even now, with smart indoor use and potential changes in landscapes that would reduce outdoor use in the irrigation season.
“Water is a precious resource that supports our way of life across Colorado, from the mountains to the ski resorts to our communities on both sides of the Continental Divide. We all have a role to play in using water responsibly.
“If you’ve been up skiing, you’ve likely seen the low snowpack firsthand, and — if conditions don’t improve — when that snow melts, it won’t be enough to completely fill our reservoirs this spring and summer.”
This chart shows the cumulative snowpack on Feb. 9, 2026, in the area of the Colorado River Basin where Denver Water captures its water supply. The snowpack is 55% of normal, which ranks among the lowest on record for Feb. 9. Image credit: U.S.D.A., Natural Resources Conservation Service.
This chart shows the cumulative snowpack on Feb. 9, 2026, in the area of the South Platte River Basin where Denver Water captures its water supply. The snowpack is 42% of normal, which ranks as the lowest on record for Feb. 9. Image credit: U.S.D.A., Natural Resources Conservation Service.
To learn more about the work Denver Water employees do to monitor the snowpack, read this TAP story about Denver Water employees snowshoeing into the forest near the top of Vail Pass in late January 2026 to conduct a monthly “snow survey.”
Additional information on Denver Water’s drought planning can be found here. Additional information on Denver Water reservoir levels, customer water use and snowpack can be found in the Water Watch Report, which is updated regularly during winter, spring and summer.
Click the link to read the release on the NRCS website:
Warm and dry conditions during January drove Colorado snowpack to record low levels statewide. Late month snowfall was insufficient to change overall conditions, increasing the likelihood of below normal peak SWE and reduced spring runoff across most river basins.
February 10th, 2026 – Warm and dry conditions persisted across Colorado during most of January, which has led to record low snowpack for much of the state. Every major river basin across Colorado received below normal precipitation in January, ranging from 58 percent of median in the Upper Rio Grande river basin to 76 percent of median in the Arkansas river basin. Although there were a series of storm systems during the first and last week of January which delivered snowfall across the state, this was not enough to improve overall conditions. Based on the 1991-2020 median, current statewide snow water equivalent (SWE) is 55 percent of normal, and ranges from 48 percent of normal in the Arkansas river basin to 64 percent of normal in the Laramie-and-North Platte river basin. Since January 13th, snowpack across Colorado has been at record low levels when compared to the 30-year normals, and with only a couple more months left in the typical snow accumulation season, it looks less likely that we will receive enough snowfall by April 1st to achieve normal peak SWE. It would take consistent, record-breaking snowfall for the rest of the season to reach normal peak SWE, and with the long-term outlooks, that is looking highly unlikely. Based on projection plots, even if the state receives average snowfall (50% projection) for the rest of the season, we would end up around 70 percent of median peak SWE (figure 1).
Figure 1: SNOTEL projection plot showing anticipated peak SWE values based on historical data percentiles. Credit: NRCS
Current statewide reservoir storage is 86 percent of median, slightly lower than this same time last year which was 94 percent of median. It’s certainly not ideal to have low reservoir storage during these dry years. With basins below normal reservoir levels will likely face more severe water shortages this upcoming runoff season. All major river basins currently have below normal reservoir storage, except the Upper Rio Grande, South Platte, and Arkansas river basins which are at 120 percent, 102 percent and 100 percent of normal. February 1, 2026 streamflow forecasts at the 50 percent exceedance probability show similar spatial trends as snowpack and precipitation. Current streamflow forecasts are predicting below normal streamflow across the entire state. They range from 28 percent of normal for Sangre de Cristo Creek to 91 percent of normal for the Big Thompson River at Canyon Mouth. Notably, the combined Laramie-North Platte and Colorado Headwaters river basins have the lowest streamflow forecasts in the state at 50 percent and 58 percent of normal. Overall, the record warm and dry conditions that have persisted for much of the 2026 water year have been detrimental for Colorado’s water supply outlook. All current indications are pointing to well-below normal streamflow across the state.
Colorado’s Snowpack and Reservoir Storage as of February 1st, 2026. Credit: NRCS
* San Miguel-Dolores-Animas-San Juan River basin
* *For more detailed information about February mountain snowpack refer to the February 1stColorado Water Supply Outlook Report. For the most up to date information about Colorado snowpack and water supply related information, refer to the Colorado Snow Survey website.
if the Colorado snowpack numbers from SNOTEL stations (52% of median) aren't low enough for you, they get even worse when looking at data across all elevations. Using the University of Arizona's SWE dataset, we're now below one-third of the usual snowpack (32.5%) as of February 9. #cowx
As evaporation rates increase and inflow from the Colorado River falls, Lake Mead’s water volume will shrink but the total mass of dissolved minerals will remain relatively stable. This creates a concentration effect where minerals like calcium, magnesium, and salts, become more densely packed in the remaining water. Without sufficient fresh inflow to dilute these minerals, the water becomes increasingly “hard,” reaching salinity levels that pose significant challenges for regional water management.1
This increasingly hard water is a silent but growing threat to household appliances owned by residents of Las Vegas, because when hard water is heated or left to evaporate, minerals like calcium and magnesium precipitate out of the liquid, forming a rock-hard crust known as limescale. This buildup acts as an insulator in water heaters, forcing them to work harder to heat water, and clogs the delicate internal components of dishwashers and washing machines. Over time, these deposits restrict water flow and corrode seals, leading to premature mechanical failure and leaks.2
The financial burden of these mineral-heavy waters translates to shorter lifecycles for major appliances and higher utility bills. Residents may find themselves replacing water heaters every 8 years instead of the typical 12 to 15, and the efficiency loss from scale buildup can increase energy costs for water heating by as much as 25%. Between more frequent appliance replacements, the cost of professional plumbing repairs, and the potential need for expensive water softening systems, the long-term economic impact on a single household can reach thousands of dollars.3
While drinking water with elevated TDS is generally considered safe by regulatory standards, it can have some noticeable effects. Very high concentrations of minerals like sulfates can cause a laxative effect or gastrointestinal discomfort in sensitive individuals or those unaccustomed to the water. While the body requires minerals like calcium and magnesium, excessive levels can affect the water’s smell and its taste, which may motivate residents to rely more on bottled water or on in-home filtration units like reverse-osmosis, which incrementally drives up the cost of living.4
A 2013 complaint that Texas was being deprived by New Mexico of its equitable apportionment of Rio Grande Compact water has finally been resolved and the compact decree approved by the special master in the case.
In a Fourth Interim Report dated Feb. 6, Hon. D. Brooks Smith agreed with the negotiated settlement by the states and the federal government that specifies how much compact water released by Colorado ends up with New Mexico and how much with Texas.
The proposed compact decree, which has to be accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court, employs use of the “Effective El Paso Index (‘Index’),” which provides a means of tracking the movement of water below Elephant Butte Reservoir for Texas’ accounting.
“Much like the river whose water the parties have quarreled over for decades, this original action has proceeded in a meandering fashion. First articulated by Texas in its 2013 Complaint, the dispute, in some sense, began about 8,000 years ago, in ancient Mesopotamia, when the Sumerians invented the concept of irrigation and incited a run on Earth’s navigable waterways,” Smith wrote in his report to the U.S. Supreme Court.
For its part, New Mexico countered that it was “excess water consumption in Texas” that interfered with the compact reporting. The standoff between the two states, with Colorado as a third party, lasted until July 3, 2023, when then-Special Master Michael J. Melloy issued a Third Interim Report (“TIR”) on the matter, which began: “Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado . . . have filed a joint motion to enter a consent decree compromising and settling ‘all claims among them arising from the 1938 Rio Grande Compact.’”
The proposed 2023 compact decree was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected it at the request of the federal government, and appointed a new special master in Smith. He brought the states and federal government back together for another round of talks, and in June of 2025 visited the lower Rio Grande to talk to farmers and to familiarize himself with the features of the basin.
“I am grateful to the parties, the amici, and all of counsel for their cooperative efforts in organizing and carrying out what was a highly informative and comprehensive real-time view of both the waters of the Lower Rio Grande and the Project,” Smith wrote in his report.
The Effective El Paso Index (“Index”), which is a feature of the proposed compact decree, measures compliance based on the amount of water that actually passes through the El Paso Gage.
“I am pleased that the Special Master has recommended the U.S. Supreme Court accept the parties’ proposed settlement of the Rio Grande Compact litigation. The settlement is the result of collaboration between Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and the United States; it includes entry of a proposed Compact Decree and dismissal of the United States’ claims,” said Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser. “I appreciate the Special Master’s thoughtful engagement in the matter and his recommendation supporting this collaborative result. His recommendation gets even closer to the finish line.”
The last step will be a decision from the Supreme Court, which Weiser said he hopes to receive by June.
Map showing new point to deliver Rio Grande water between Texas and New Mexico, at an existing stream gage in East El Paso. (Courtesy of Margaret “Peggy” Barroll in the joint motion)
Colorado’s mountain snowpack is in bad shape this year. It’s been extremely warm, and snowstorms have been few and far between. Based on data from the SNOTEL network, the amount of water stored in the snow is the lowest at this point in the winter since at least 1987. Sometimes when one part of the state is lacking for snow, another region is doing ok, but not this year. Essentially all of Colorado is in a snow drought.
Graph of snow water equivalent for the state of Colorado as of February 7, 2026, based on 115 automated SNOTEL stations. The current year (2026) is in black, and as of early February is lower than all other years going back to 1987. Graph from USDA/NRCS.
Snow droughts have been getting more common in Colorado in the 21st century. But those who have been around Colorado longer than I have may also remember two other terrible winters for snow: 1976-77 and 1980-81. In fact, some photos sit on my desk from former state climatologist Nolan Doesken from tours through the mountains in those years. At that time, snowmaking was uncommon at the ski resorts, and there were serious concerns about whether the ski industry would survive through those two historic snow droughts. (This story from 2012 by Jason Blevins, then at the Denver Post, now at the Colorado Sun, has some relevant background.) We’ve been fielding quite a few questions about how the snowpack this winter compares to those brutal years, so let’s take a closer look.
Slides of photos of “Drought, 1/21/81”, provided by Nolan Doesken
Photo from 1/21/1981, approaching Dillon, provided by Nolan Doesken
First, a bit about snow measurements
Because of the importance of mountain snow to water supplies, the federal government (specifically, the Department of Agriculture) has for decades collected snowpack data across the western US. The USDA snow survey was established in the 1930s, with routine “snow course” measurements in the winter and spring. These are manual measurements of the snow depth, snow water equivalent, and so on. (Here’s some archival footage of snow surveying. I believe that smoking a pipe while taking the measurements is discouraged these days.)
Photos of USDA staff taking snow measurements. From the Colorado Snow Survey website.
The Bear Lake SNOTEL station in Rocky Mountain National Park in May 2022, photo by Russ Schumacher.
Measuring snow this way takes a lot of time and effort, however. So the 2nd pillar of the USDA’s snow survey program, the “Snow Telemetry” or SNOTEL network, was established starting in the 1960s. These are automated stations that use a “snow pillow” to measure the weight of the snow, and convert that into an amount of liquid water, among other measurements. SNOTEL data allow agricultural producers, water managers, climatologists, and the public to keep tabs on the snowpack in near-real-time. The snow course measurements have the advantage of a longer period of record to compare to, but are only collected once a month from February through May; the SNOTEL data are available daily from over 100 stations but with a shorter period of record.
What do the data show for this winter?
The graph up at the top shows that in the SNOTEL era, Colorado’s snowpack is the worst on record as of early February. However, there weren’t yet any SNOTEL stations in Colorado for the 1976-77 winter, and the network was still being built out as of 1980-81. So, if we want to compare the current snowpack to those two years, we’ll have to take a look at the tried-and-true snow course measurements, which the USDA has been collecting for the first time this season over the last week or so.
When comparing the snow water equivalent on February 1st at 62 snow courses with more than 50 years of data, there are eight sites where this year (2026) is the lowest on record. They are shown with the dark brown circles on the map below. Another fourteen sites have either the 2nd or 3rd lowest snowpack on record, and many more are in the bottom 10 years historically.
Rank of February 1 snow water equivalent at snow course sites with more than 50 years of observations. The color shading in the background shows elevation, with blue/white colors representing higher elevations. Credit: Colorado Climate Center
We can also look at which years had the lowest SWE as of February 1. At the locations where this year isn’t the worst snowpack, the worst February conditions were generally either in 1977 or 1981 (with some dishonorable mention to 2018 in the southern mountains.)
Water year with the lowest snow water equivalent at snow course sites with more than 50 years of records. Credit: Colorado Climate Center
Using data from 20 snow course sites in Colorado with consistent data back to at least 1940, we can see that this year has the lowest snow water equivalent since the two terrible years of 1977 and 1981, and lower than any of the other years in the record.
February 1 snow water equivalent at 20 snow courses in Colorado, as a percent of the 1991-2020 median. Data from USDA/NRCS. Credit: Colorado Climate Center
So, it’s fair to say that this year so far has the worst snowpack in Colorado in over 40 years. But in most locations it’s not quite as bad as the conditions were in 1976-77 and 1980-81.
However, obviously a lot of things have changed since the late 1970s! Nearly all ski areas now have robust snowmaking operations, which allow them to keep terrain open even when there’s not much snow falling from the sky. On the flip side, the population of Colorado has grown immensely—approximately twice as many people live in the state now as did in 1980. Which means that the demand for water (and for winter recreation) is much greater, and thus the potential impacts of a snow drought are much greater as well.
What has really set this water year apart thus far is how warm it’s been. For Colorado statewide, we just had the 3rd warmest November and the warmest December in over 130 years of records. January was very warm as well. Official numbers for January will be released this week (make sure you’re signed up to get our monthly summaries), but it clearly ranked among the top 20 warmest Januarys, and early February has continued the streak of warmth. The warmest start to a water year we’ve ever seen, combined with a lack of the snowstorms we typically see in winter, has brought us to the worst mid-winter mountain snowpack in decades.
We do still have about 2 months to go before the mountain snowpack typically hits its peak, which means there is still time to chip away at the deficit. Looking back at the major mid-winter snow droughts discussed above, in 1977 it remained dry in late winter and spring, and that season still holds the record for worst April 1 snowpack at many locations in Colorado. In contrast, the spring of 1981 was fairly active; at least enough to emerge above record-low territory for much of the state.
This week, the pattern will finally shift away from warm and sunny conditions to more consistent chances for snowfall. However, it’s too early to say how long the incoming pattern will stick around, and unfortunately there aren’t any blockbuster storm cycles on the horizon in the near term. An active spring would certainly be very welcome, but the odds of rebounding to near normal peak snowpack conditions are dwindling. More realistically, we are just hoping to get enough snow to avoid a historically bad year.
*special thanks to Brian Domonkos of the USDA/NRCS Colorado Snow Survey for providing useful details about this year’s snow course measurements
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map February 9, 2026.
The outflow at the bottom of Navajo Dam in New Mexico. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
From email from Reclamation Western Colorado Area Office:
The Bureau of Reclamation has scheduled a decrease in the release from Navajo Dam from 350 cubic feet per second (cfs) to 300 cfs for Tuesday, February 10th, at 8:00 AM.
Releases are being made through the 4×4 gates while the powerplant is down for maintance.
Releases are made for the authorized purposes of the Navajo Unit, and to attempt to maintain a target base flow through the endangered fish critical habitat reach of the San Juan River (Farmington to Lake Powell). The San Juan River Basin Recovery Implementation Program recommends a target base flow of between 500 cfs and 1,000 cfs through the critical habitat area. The target base flow is calculated as the weekly average of gaged flows throughout the critical habitat area from Farmington to Lake Powell.
This scheduled release change is subject to changes in river flows and weather conditions. If you have any questions, please reply to this message, call 970-385-6500, or visit Reclamation’s Navajo Dam website at https://www.usbr.gov/uc/water/crsp/cs/nvd.html
Map of the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado River, in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, USA. Made using USGS National Map data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47456307
U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, center, speaks during a gathering with governors from six states in the Colorado River basin on Friday, Jan. 30, 2026. Photo credit: Lowell Whitman/Department Of Interior
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Scott Franz):
February 2, 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.
Governors and negotiators from the seven Colorado River basin states met behind closed doors for about two hours in Washington on Friday [January 30, 2026] to talk with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum about the dwindling waterway’s future.
After they left the meeting, governors were quick to issue statements praising the gathering as ‘productive’ and ‘meaningful,’ but no deal among the states was announced by Monday afternoon.
“There is still a lot of work ahead to get to an agreement, but everyone wants an agreement, and we’ll work together to create a pathway forward,” New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a statement.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs said she was “encouraged to hear Upper Basin governors express a willingness to turn water conservation programs into firm commitments of water savings.”
Upriver in Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis said in a statement he “defended our mighty Colorado River.”
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis speaks Friday, Jan. 30 at a meeting about the future of the Colorado River at the Interior Department in Washington. Photo credit: Lowell Whitman/Department Of Interior
“I always fight to defend our water, whether it’s at the Department of Interior, Congress, or the courtroom,” he said.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said he left the meeting “hopeful that we’ll avoid the path of litigation.”
“No one wins going down that path,” he said in a statement.
And Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon issued perhaps the most optimistic statement of the group.
“I am wholeheartedly encouraged by our conversation and believe there is a definitive path” toward a deal, he said.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom missed the meeting, but his natural resources secretary, Wade Crowfoot, was in the room.
Crowfoot said in a statement afterward that he was “cautiously optimistic that an agreement is possible, and we’re working hard to make it happen.”
Negotiators from the lower and upper basins entered the meeting at a yearslong impasse over how water restrictions should be managed during dry years.
They now have less than two weeks until a federal Feb. 14 deadline to reach an agreement.
Pressure to reach a deal is building.
Forecasts for the water supply from the Colorado River continue to grow worse as snowpack lags far behind normal across the West.
And negotiators from the basins have said there are “sticking points” that remain in the negotiations in recent weeks that even marathon talks have failed to resolve.
“Some in the lower basin wanted some sort of guaranteed supply, irrespective of hydrologic conditions,” Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s top negotiator, told KUNC last week on the eve of the DC summit. “And I think asking people to guarantee something that cannot be guaranteed is a recipe that cannot get to success.”
California’s negotiator, J.B. Hamby, said during a recent speech that “continued back and forth between the basins haven’t really been moving the ball forward.”
He welcomed potential federal intervention to help strike a deal.
“The administrations…have this important role in sometimes knocking heads together, sometimes encouraging consensus, and having diplomatic discussions between the states to be able to move conversations forward,” he said.
The Colorado River Water Conservation District spans 15 Western Slope counties. Colorado River District/Courtesy image
Click the link to read the article on the Glenwood Springs Post-Independent website (Ali Longwell). Here’s an excerpt:
February 3, 2026
As part of its spring tradition, the Colorado River District will give its State of the River address to a dozen Western Slope communities starting in March. Each State of the River will provide information on river forecasts, local water projects and key challenges impacting Western Slope water users. The events will take place everywhere from the Upper Yampa, Roaring Fork and the Middle Colorado river basins down to the Lower Gunnison and Uncompahgre river basins. While each program’s agenda will vary slightly and is tailored to reflect local water priorities, key topics at all events will include:
River flow forecasts, snowpack, and drought summaries
Updates on the Colorado River system and interstate negotiations
Shoshone Water Rights Preservation Project updates
Local water projects and priorities
Each event will also include a complimentary light dinner and an opportunity for residents to ask questions of water experts. While it is free to attend, the River District requests that all attendees register in advance at ColoradoRIverDistrict.org/2026-State-of-the-River-Meetings.
Click the link to read the article on the KJZZ webdsite (Howard Fischer). Here’s an excerpt:
February 4, 2026
Gov. Katie Hobbs said Monday that unless Upper Basin states actually offer up some firm commitments to conserve water she won’t agree to any deal for Arizona to cut its own withdrawals from the Colorado River. And that would lead to either Interior Secretary Doug Burgum imposing his own solution on the seven states that draw water from the river — or the situation having to be hashed out in court. Only thing is, Burgum has so far refused to do more than bring the governors of the affect states together, as he did on Friday. And Terry Goddard, president of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District, which oversees the state’s Colorado River supply, said the options put forward by the Interior Department “are not palatable to Arizona or California,” one of the two other Lower Basin states.
“All Burgum’s done is set us up for litigation,” he told Capitol Media Services. “And I think that’s sad.”
Still, [Governor Hobbs] said she thinks it doesn’t necessarily have to wind up in court, even though Arizona already has set aside $3 million for litigation.
“While we didn’t leave with a lot of specifics — the details are to be worked out through negotiation — I think that we came away with hearing that nobody wants to end up in litigation,” Hobbs said. “We want to find a way to get to a deal.”
But Hobbs said that means recognizing that Arizona, which already has agreed to give up 27% of the water it has been getting from the Colorado River, won’t give up a drop more unless there are firm and enforceable promises that the Upper Basin states will share in the burden.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Goose Pasture Tarn. Photo credit: City of Breckenridge
Click the link to read the article on the Summit Daily website (Kit Geary). Here’s an excerpt:
February 4, 2026
A 54-year-old water treatment plant in Breckenridge has reached the end of its life, and preliminary cost estimates put rehabilitating it at $54 million. Breckenridge town staff members presented Breckenridge Town Council with plans for a series of projects to help the Gary Roberts Water Treatment plant reliably meet current demand at a Tuesday, Jan. 27, meeting. The Gary Roberts Water Treatment is located at the Goose Pasture Tarn. A staff memo stated the town first evaluated improvements and rehabilitation options in 2014, but they put those on hold to prioritize Goose Pasture Tarn dam repairs. The memo noted the continued aging of the plant now makes it a critical project. It included photos of the plan demonstrating pitting, corrosion and leaks in the water tanks at the plant…The project is currently proposed to be phased from 2027 to 2029. Staff members said there are no anticipated impacts to residents’ water service. While preliminary cost estimates put the project at $54 million, the budget the town planned for was $50 million. Officials asked staff members what tools were at the town’s disposal to make the project stay within a reasonable budget.
The Gunnison River Basin Roundtable recently announced grants of up to $1,500 for water education through its public education, participation and outreach committee. The 2026 Water Education Grant is now accepting applications. Funds are available to anyone engaged in water education, including public and private schools, libraries, scout troops, homeschoolers, 4-H clubs and other organizations offering programming for children up to 18 years old in the Gunnison Basin. Applications are due at 5 p.m. on Feb. 23. For more information, visit gunnisonriverbasin.org/.
Division engineer Craig Cotten, left, and Pat McDermott of the Colorado Division of Water Resources, deliver the state water resources report on the final day of the 2026 Southern Rocky Mountain Ag Conference. Credit: The Citizen
An unconfined aquifer that is getting “worse and worse,” not better.
Such is the reality of the situation for the Upper Rio Grande Basin and warnings given to the San Luis Valley farming and ranching community on the final day of the 2026 Southern Rocky Mountain Ag Conference.
If you’re a praying sort, it isn’t too early in 2026 to fold your hands together toward the heavens. If not, a good wish or two would be fine as well.
The outlook is that dire. Except for the hope that a changing weather pattern from La Niña to El Niño at some point this year will deliver the goods and avoid even more of a collapse.
“We do anticipate at this moment, at this date that it’s going to be a poor runoff in 2026,” said Pat McDermott of the Colorado Division of Water Resources. It is customary for him and state division engineer Craig Cotten to provide a look back at the recent water year and a look ahead to the next spring runoff.
McDermott typically attempts a positive spin for the large audience that fills the main conference room at the Outcalt Center of the Ski Hi Complex in anticipation of the state water resources report. He did his best by pointing to a rosier outlook in the 2026 Farmer’s Almanac, the last annual edition.
It is the state, after all, that governs groundwater pumping in the San Luis Valley and has metrics Valley farmers are required to meet to stay in business. One is the recovery of the unconfined aquifer through buy-and-dry and reduced groundwater pumping strategies.
“It just kind of gets worse and worse every year that we look at it,” said Cotten in referencing the storage levels of the Upper Rio Grande’s unconfined aquifer and the greater level of recovery efforts crop producers in Subdistrict 1 are facing as a result.
“Unfortunately it’s going in the wrong direction and it has been for quite some time here,” Cotten said in referencing the latest five-year average for storage.
THE NUMBERS
Rio Grande 2025
493,000 acre-feet – Annual index flow or 80 percent of long-term average past 30 years
125,000 acre-feet – Obligation to New Mexico and Texas under Rio Grande Compact
Rio Grande saw an increase of 95,000 acre-feet due to October 2025 rain.
Conejos River 2025
205,000 acre-feet – Annual index flow or 68 percent of the long-term average of 300,000 acre-feet
46,900 acre-feet – Obligation to New Mexico and Texas
Conejos River saw an increase of 15,000 acre-feet due to October 2025 rain.
February’s current conditions
Statewide snowpack: 55 percent of median
Upper Rio Grande snowpack: 48 percent of median
Warmest December on record for nine western states based on 131 years of temperature data.
Nathan Coombs and Heather Dutton, both key players in the water conservation world locally and at the state level, gave further explanation on the changing weather patterns that are impacting the basin and the amount of water available for irrigation.
Coombs pointed to the problem of overnight temperatures in the late fall and winter months, and the fact the Valley just isn’t getting the sub-zero temperatures it used to.
Look at December 2025, which saw an average daily low for the month of 11 degrees – double digits overnight – when the normal low for December is 0.8 degrees. January of this year had an average daily low of 4 degrees instead of the -1 that is a normal overnight low temperature for the month. It would have been higher than 4 degrees were it not for sub-zero overnight lows in 5 of the last 7 nights of January.
“We’re not sunburning that much harder, we’re just losing the cold,” Coombs said to his fellow farmers.
The timing of when the moisture comes is off, too. Look at the past two water years – 2024 and 2025 – when heavy rains in October came through and added to the total overall amount of water in the Rio Grande and Conejos River systems.
Too late to help irrigators, but good enough to help the amount of water in the Rio Grande and Conejos River, overall.
“Look at how it’s changing,” Coombs said. “Useful water for irrigation is changing in more ways than just volumes. We’re seeing timing change. So that’s part of what this is. Mother Nature is playing a big role in this. We’ve got to figure that component out a little better. We don’t need to look across the fence at what our neighbors are or aren’t doing. Let’s figure out how we correct to that.”
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
Sen. Mike Lee, the MAGAt from Utah, appears to be vying to be the most anti-public land politician in history. The Trump sycophant was, of course, behind last year’s congressional bids to sell off public land to real estate developers and various other schemes. His latest assault is the Historic Roadways Protection Act, which passed through a Senate committee yesterday. It would block the Bureau of Land Management from “closing historical roads” and implementing travel management plans across a broad swath of federal lands in Utah until a federal court rules on thousands of county RS-2477 claims.
RS-2477 is an 1866 statute that allowed highways to be constructed across federal lands to access mining claims and homesteads. It was repealed in 1976 when Congress passed the Federal Land Policy Management Act, or FLPMA. But FLPMA grandfathered in existing “highways” that had been constructed under RS-2477. In 2010 and 2011, Utah and its counties filed some 12,000 RS-2477 claims on about 35,000 miles of “highways” on federal lands, many of which are no more than old livestock tracks, in hope of gaining control of the paths so they can grade them, widen them, and even pave them. Settling all of these claims could take decades, meaning Lee’s bill would essentially be banning the BLM from managing travel on these areas forever.
Albert Bacon Fall, the New Mexico Senator and disgraced Interior Secretary under President Warren G. Harding still has my vote for the most anti-public land politician. But maybe that’s because Fall was actually a colorful character. Lee’s most interesting trait is that he holds Jell-O socials in his Capitol office.
One of the things I like about Page, Arizona, are the weird and ubiquitous contrasts that characterize the place. There’s the surreality of a lakeside city in the desert and the striking juxtaposition of golf course greens against stone. But perhaps the most jarring of all is the sensation of wandering Safeway’s aisles in a distinctly American town and hearing fellow patrons speaking languages from all over the world.
The Southwest attracts visitors from across the globe and, as a result, the increasingly dominant tourism and outdoor recreation industries have come to depend on international travelers. After Trump was inaugurated and implemented his America First creed, which tends to manifest as hostility towards every other nation, international travel to the U.S. dropped. That’s in spite of the fact that Trump’s economic policies have also caused the dollar’s value to plummet, making the U.S. a cheap vacation spot for Europeans.
Over the summer of 2025, that appears to have led to a drop in visitation to most national parks in the Southwest. However, visitation tended to rebound in the fall — perhaps due to lower gas prices — bringing the annual numbers back up to close to what they were in 2024.
One exception was Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which saw a huge drop in visitors last year, probably due to a combination of low reservoir levels at Lake Powell, a massive wildfire on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim, and the drop in international visitation. But if tax revenues are any indication, it hasn’t hurt the overall tourism industry in Page that badly. Sales tax, hotel/motel tax, and online lodging tax revenues for January through September 2025 were up significantly from the previous year, according to the City of Page’s statistics.
Grand Canyon NP and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area saw the biggest drops in year-over-year visitation in 2025, which may be due to a fire on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim and the drop in international travel to the U.S. Visitation continues to grow at Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Olympic National Parks. Source: NPS.
Arches National Park saw a marked decrease in visitation following the implementation of a timed entry system in 2022, but since then it has held steady and increased between 2024 and 2025. Most other Southwest national park units saw a decrease in visitation last year, however.
🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑
The most expensive home on the market in Jackson Hole currently. Source: Zillow.
You’ll all be thrilled, I’m sure, to learn that the uber-wealthy had a pretty good year in 2025, at least if high-end home and land sales are any indication. Luxury real estate sales in Jackson, Wyoming, reportedly are “surging” and “closed the year with exceptional momentum.” That’s the latest from The Viehman Group’s Jackson Hole Report, something I read when I want that lovely sensation of barfing in the back of my mouth.
Thirty-seven homes sold for over $10 million in the region last year, with 25 of them netting a sale price of over $15 million. The most expensive home sale was the Bar B Bar Ranch 4, with “multiple enhanced spring creeks for fishing,” which went for a modest $43 million.
But don’t worry! Overpriced luxury homes remain for the taking! For instance, you can buy a glorified quonset hut — er, an 8,583-square-foot steel, glass, and stone mansion — for $60 million. I know that seems like a lot, but according to Zillow’s BuyAbility calculator, the monthly payments would be a mere $320,673 after a $12 million down payment.
The median earnings for full-time year-round workers in Teton County are about $70,000 per year, which, according to Zillow’s mortgage calculator, could allow one to afford a $220,000 home with a $10,000 down payment. Meanwhile, the median home sale price in Teton County is about $3.8 million. And the cheapest home on the market is a 1970s, 644 sf condo listed for $695,000 (after a $30k reduction).
So, yeah, the West’s housing affordability crisis is as bad as ever, and the gap between the uber-rich and everyone else continues to grow.
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
The Abundance movement has reached the Colorado River, brought by an unexpected flag-bearer. The motorized recreation organization, BlueRibbon Coalition, is proposing the Colorado River Abundance Act. The vision, writes the coalition, is simple: “The American Southwest does not have to settle for managing a dwindling resource. It can choose abundance and start building.”
Building what? You ask. The answer: “A coordinated suite of desalination plants — offshore, onshore, and binational — supported by pipelines, pumping systems, brine-management facilities, and sediment removal programs.” These plants would crank out as much as 7 million acre-feet of water per year and deliver it to the river and/or directly to Lower Basin water users. That would allow more water to stay in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, thereby buoying reservoir levels.
And that would, among other things, improve boating and other recreation on those reservoirs, which is why the BlueRibbon Coalition is pushing the concept. In addition to creating funds for building a massive amount of water desalination and transportation infrastructure, the proposed legislation would also “elevate recreation to a coequal project purpose, establishing Recreation Modernization Plans for key reservoirs,” and pushing major upgrades to marinas, launch ramps, docks, trails, and shoreline facilities, “including a top-priority requirement to rebuild mid-lake services at Lake Powell with fast-track approval.”
That’s referring to the late Dangling Rope Marina, a remote floating boat refueling and restocking station in Dangling Rope Canyon, located about halfway between the down-lake marinas and Halls Crossing in the upper section of the reservoir. But low water levels and a damaged electrical system forced the National Park Service to shutter it in 2021, and it has not been reopened or replaced.
This abundance approach could work, in theory. But consider this: the largest desalination plant in the world, Ras Al Khair in Saudi Arabia, can treat about 306,500 acre-feet of water per year. It reportedly cost about $7 billion to construct, and uses about 3,626 megawatt-hours of electricity each day — that adds up to 1,323 gigawatt-hours annually, or enough to power tens of thousands of homes (or a handful of data centers). You’d need about 20 of those leviathans and a crapload of generation capacity to reach the 7 MAF/yr target of this plan, not to mention the extensive pumping and piping infrastructure to get the water to where it needs to go.
At some point, doesn’t it seem just a little bit easier, and a hell of a lot less expensive, to live within our means?
I will say that the Abundance approach is a step up from a, let’s say Archimedean, proposal to raise Lake Powell’s level by, wait for it, throwing a bunch of car batteries into the reservoir. If you’re wondering if this was a serious idea or not, just consider from where it came: The Sonoran Avalanche Center.
Sonoran Avalanche Center on Instagram: “Our first song about ba…
The Land Desk has been talking a lot about the effects the low snowpack will have on water supplies, Lake Powell, and irrigators. But it’s also hurting the ski industry — Vail Resorts reported a 20% drop in skier visits this winter — and that’s hurting the communities and workers that rely on that industry. The news clip below reports on how a Summit County food bank is being overwhelmed by new demand this winter.
The median home price in Summit County, by the way, is about $995,000.
🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭
Detail from Clason’s Industrial Map of Colorado, circa 1904. Unfortunately, I only had space for one outtake from this one, so look for more in the future, because it’s cool. Note how back then the road from Naturita to Norwood followed the San Miguel River to Piñon before heading south to Coventry (which is now Redvale, I guess?). Also, the towns of Hydraulic and Uranium on the Dolores River downstream from the confluence with the San Miguel. If anyone can point out those locations on a modern map, I’d be much obliged!
Gross Reservoir, southwest of Boulder, Colorado, in October 2019. The reservoir, which supplies Denver Water customers on the Front Range, depends heavily on snowmelt. Photo by Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk. Aerial support provided by LightHawk.
This story was produced by The Water Desk, an independent journalism program at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
The American West’s snowpack is valuable for many reasons.
Snowmelt supplies much of the water flowing through the region’s streams, rivers, irrigation canals and household faucets—a vital role that has taken on new urgency this winter as much of the West struggles with scant snow cover.
Snowfall supports countless species, maintains forest health and helps keep a lid on wildfires. It even cools the planet by reflecting sunlight.
Snowflakes also underlie the region’s multi-billion-dollar winter sports industry, fueling local economies and drawing millions of participants. In warmer months, boating and fishing depend on water that was once frozen.
Snow performs all these functions, but can its worth be calculated in dollars and cents? And how is climate change affecting that value?
Like many aspects of nature, snow is easier to monetize in some domains than others. Its ecological benefits are complex, and its aesthetic qualities are subjective: some Westerners love the ice crystals, others dread them.
But in the economic realm, researchers have attempted to put a dollar figure on the region’s snow, and the numbers they’ve generated are huge.
“This stuff’s worth trillions, not billions” of dollars, said snow scientist Matthew Sturm, lead author of a widely cited 2017 paper in Water Resources Research that estimated the value of the water embedded in the West’s snowpack. “I turn on the tap in the Western states—what comes out of it is mostly snow.”
The Colorado River, which supplies drinking water to tens of millions of people and irrigates vast croplands, is primarily driven by snowmelt. The river generated an estimated $1.4 trillion in annual economic activity, according to a 2014 report commissioned by Protect the Flows, a business coalition, and conducted by Arizona State University. Adjusted only for inflation—not the region’s growth—that figure was equivalent to about $1.9 trillion in 2025, underscoring the high stakes of the ongoing, contentious negotiations over how to manage the Colorado River.
For some researchers, assigning a dollar value to snow is more than an academic exercise. In an era of tightening budgets and federal cutbacks in science, economic estimates can help justify investments in monitoring and studying snow—and highlight how much is at risk as the climate warms.
“If you want society to respond, you better talk about things that are fairly immediate, right at people’s doorsteps, and are easy to explain,” said Sturm, a professor of geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute and the author of A Field Guide to Snow.
Or as Sturm’s paper puts it, “the ‘killer argument’ to the wider public that vigorous snow research is important would come by framing the argument in terms of money, something everyone understands.”
Peer-reviewed studies explicitly valuing the snowpack are rare, but some analyses have also calculated the sizable economic impact of snow sports. This winter, skiing and snowboarding in the West have been constrained not only by a lack of snowfall but also by record warmth that limited some resorts’ ability to make artificial snow.
A 2024 report from the National Ski Areas Association concluded that downhill snow sports generate $58.9 billion in annual economic activity in the United States and support an estimated 533,000 ski and snowboard jobs nationwide.
While the snowpack delivers tangible economic benefits—some easier to price than others—snowfall also carries real costs. Any accounting of snow’s economic impact must also reckon with the damage it causes.
Winter weather contributes to fatalities from avalanches in the mountains and from heart attacksin cities among people shoveling snow. But those deaths pale in comparison to the toll on slick roads. Each year, 24% of weather-related vehicle crashes happen on snowy, slushy or icy pavement, and 15% occur when snow or sleet is falling, according to the Federal Highway Administration. More than 1,300 people are killed and more than 116,800 are injured each year in crashes on snowy, slushy or icy pavement, the agency reports, though not all of those incidents are weather related.
The Animas River and San Juan Mountains in southwest Colorado in May 2023. The snowpack serves as a natural reservoir that releases water in warmer months. Photo by Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk. Aerial support provided by LightHawk.
Valuing the snowpack’s water
The 2017 paper began with a phone call that Sturm made to Michael Goldstein, a professor of finance at Babson College with whom he had previously collaborated.
“Hey, what do you think snowpack’s worth?” Goldstein recalled Sturm asking.
Goldstein wasn’t a snow expert, but he told Sturm, “If we make some simplifying assumptions here, I could value it for you.”
“I just thought it was a cool question,” said Goldstein, who is also the Donald P. Babson Chair in Applied Investments at Babson.
Since its publication, the study has been cited nearly 400 times, according to Google Scholar.
Viewed through an economic lens, the snowpack’s role as a mountain water tower provided a clear value that Goldstein could quantify.
“Nature naturally stores the water for you for free. You didn’t have to build a reservoir,” Goldstein said. “If that goes away, that actually has a cost. And the cost is the replacement cost of either storing the water or getting water from a different source.”
Climate change is already having a variety of profound effects on the West’s snow, such as shrinking the snowpack season, but the study focuses on one key impact: the shift from snow to rain as temperatures rise.
Even if total precipitation remains unchanged in the decades ahead, a transition from snow to rain—and faster melting of the snowpack—means runoff will occur earlier in the year. In much of the West, however, it may be impossible to capture all that earlier water for later use because dam managers must leave enough empty space in reservoirs to reduce the risk of catastrophic flooding.
“There is not enough reservoir storage capacity over most of the West to handle this shift in maximum runoff and so most of the ‘early water’ will be passed on to the oceans,” according to a 2005 study.
To estimate the declining value of the snowpack in a warming climate, the 2017 paper made some assumptions about the transition from snow to rain—an evolution expected to be more pronounced in warmer regions such as California and Oregon than in colder locations like the Northern Rockies.
Examining a range of future trajectories spanning five to 100 years, the researchers assumed that half of current snowfall would fall as rain by the end of the scenario.
For the 50% of snow that would eventually convert to rain, some of the water could be captured by existing reservoirs. But while Lake Mead and Lake Powell on the Colorado River currently have plenty of room to spare, the authors note that “virtually every report we have found on the heavily dammed water systems of the West suggests that reservoir capacity (except when immediately following drought) is maxed out.” As a result, the paper assumes that water systems would lose two-thirds of the reduced snowmelt runoff.
“We’re losing, essentially, the storage capacity of snow—meaning in lieu of snow, we get rain,” Sturm said.
With their estimates of the amount of water lost as snow shifts to rain, the researchers could then multiply those figures by the cost of water to begin determining the decline in monetary value. The paper uses two water prices to bracket its estimates: $200 and $900 per acre-foot (an acre-foot is the volume of water needed to cover an acre of land to a depth of 12 inches, or 325,851 gallons).
In reality, Goldstein said, the price of water would rise as supplies became scarcer. But the paper holds water prices constant over time, an assumption that yields a conservative estimate of the snowpack’s value.
This map shows the share of annual precipitation that falls as snow over land, based on data from 2000 to 2010. In the Northern Hemisphere, the area where 40% or more of precipitation falls as snow covers more than 5.8 million square miles. At its peak, snow typically blankets more than 22 million square miles of the Northern Hemisphere. Source: Drew Slater, National Snow and Ice Data Center, via Sturm et al. (2017).
Discounting the future
The price of water varies greatly across the West, so estimates of the snowpack’s value will necessarily span a broad range. But water costs aren’t the only reason it’s challenging to pin down the snowpack’s monetary worth.
Another challenge the paper grapples with is the changing value of money over time. Even in the absence of inflation, if someone offered you $100 right now versus $100 in a year, the economically rational choice would be to take the $100 today. After all, a lot can happen in a year—and you could invest the $100 in the meantime. But what if the offer were $105 or $110 a year from now?
To convert future benefits into today’s dollars, economists use a “discount rate” that accounts for risk and the preference for receiving payments sooner rather than later. A discount rate is “like the foreign exchange rate between consumption today and consumption tomorrow,” Goldstein said.
The choice of the discount rate can make a big difference in how future costs or benefits are calculated, and it’s often a pivotal factor in studies of the economics of climate change. In the snowpack paper, the authors use three discount rates—1%, 3% and 6%—although they omit the 6% rate in their final valuation “because it is fairly extreme and unlikely to be correct in a water-stressed future world.”
The higher the discount rate, the more heavily future losses are discounted, reducing the economic justification for acting today, such as acquiring new water supplies or building additional reservoirs.
Assumptions about the discount rate, the price of water and future climate trajectories all weigh heavily on estimates of the value of the snowpack’s water. In summary, the authors conclude that about 162 million acre-feet of water is deposited as snow in Western mountains each winter. If half of that snowfall were to fall as rain in the future—and two-thirds of that water were to run off to the ocean without being captured—water systems would lose roughly 53.9 million acre-feet per year. That volume is roughly the combined storage capacity of Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the nation’s two largest reservoirs.
The total replacement cost for the lost water ranged from $120 billion to $4.76 trillion, according to the 2017 study. By comparison, the federal government’s budget totaled about $3.85 trillion in fiscal year 2016.
“To date, a full financial evaluation of the importance of snow in our lives has not been made, but computations here and elsewhere indicate it is on the order of trillions of dollars,” the authors write.
The snowpack’s importance and value vary across the West, with some watersheds more dependent on snowmelt than others. To estimate the local impacts of future snowpack losses, researchers used data from the 2017 study and another paper to create an interactive map that shows the share of water in each Western river basin derived from snow and lets users adjust key variables, including the discount rate, the price of water and the rate at which snow transitions to rain.
An interactive map shows the present value of future snowpack losses across Western river basins. Users can adjust key assumptions—including the price of water, the discount rate and the pace of the transition from snow to rain—to see how projected losses change by watershed. Map by Matthew Sturm and Ryan Bateman, based on data from Li et al. (2017) and Sturm et al. (2017).
Investing in snow science
Jessica Lundquist, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Washington, called the paper “interesting and unique.” Lundquist, who wasn’t an author of the study but is acknowledged for advising the researchers, said the paper not only tried to put a dollar value on the snowpack but “also was trying to put a value on the knowledge.”
“I like the paper because it was a collaboration between a snow scientist and an economist,” Lundquist said. While the estimates of the snowpack’s value are uncertain, Lundquist said the study provides a useful framework for assessing the financial implications of water management strategies.
In a commentary on the 2017 paper, subtitled “Investments in snow pay high-dollar dividends,” Lundquist wrote that the study “puts the value of snow one thousand times higher than the estimates of snow based on tourism alone.”
When the commentary was published, snow scientists were trying to convince NASA to launch a satellite mission to study the snowpack.
“We were often getting questions about what is the value not only of snow, but of studying snow,” Lundquist said.
A satellite dedicated to monitoring snow never launched. But scientists continue to track the snowpack using other spacecraft, along with a suite of tools that includes aircraft, automated stations and manual measurements.
“I think we’re getting progressively better at figuring out how much snow is in the mountains,” Lundquist said. “I think we’ve made tremendous progress in the last 10 years that we can actually quantify it quite well with a number of ways.”
In other parts of the world, however, snowpack monitoring may be very limited. “A lot of what still needs to be done is in other mountain ranges, other places that don’t have these observing networks,” Lundquist said. “There’s a lot of people who depend on water from the Himalaya who just have no idea whether it’s going to be a drought year or a flood year or what is upstream at all.”
The Yampa River, upstream from Steamboat Springs, Colorado, in December 2019. The Yampa is a tributary of the Green River, which feeds into the Colorado River—the water source for tens of millions of people. Photo by Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk.
Recreational impact of a shrinking snowpack
Beyond supplying water, the West’s snowpack also underpins the region’s winter recreation economy.
During the 2024–25 season, U.S. ski areas recorded 61.5 million skier visits, according to the National Ski Areas Association. This winter, however, visitation across much of the West has suffered amid a widespread snow drought.
In January, Vail Resorts, which is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, reported that visits to its mountains so far this season were down 20% compared to last season, primarily because of poor snow conditions. In the Rockies, only about 11% of the company’s terrain opened in December, when snowfall was nearly 60% below the 30-year average.
A number of studies have examined how changes in the snowpack affect ski areas—both historically and in future projections.
Between 1999 and 2010, the U.S. downhill ski industry lost an estimated $1.07 billion in revenue between low- and high-snowfall years, resulting in 13,000 to 27,000 fewer jobs, according to a 2012 analysis by University of New Hampshire researchers. The report was commissioned by Protect Our Winters and the Natural Resources Defense Council, two advocacy groups.
A 2024 study estimated that U.S. ski areas lost more than $5 billion from 2000 to 2019 due to fewer visits and higher snowmaking costs. Compared to the 1960-1979 period, ski seasons from 2000 to 2019 shortened by 5.5 to 7.1 days, according to a model of operations at 226 ski areas.
Looking ahead, the study projected that by the 2050s, ski seasons would shrink by 14 to 33 days under a low greenhouse gas emissions scenario and by 27 to 62 days under a high-emissions pathway. Under those scenarios, annual industry losses ranged from $657 million to $1.35 billion.
The 2024 study accounted for the added expenses of snowmaking, which requires investments in equipment and labor while also increasing water and energy use. It did not, however, include the broader ripple effects of shorter ski seasons on surrounding communities, where hotels, restaurants, bars, retailers, and gas stations depend heavily on tourists’ spending.
A 2017 study examining future climate impacts on skiing and snowmobiling analyzed 247 winter recreation locations across the continental United States and projected how warming would shorten seasons. The authors concluded that “virtually all locations are projected to see reductions in winter recreation season lengths, exceeding 50% by 2050 and 80% in 2090 for some downhill skiing locations.”
Those shorter seasons “could result in millions to tens of millions of foregone recreational visits annually by 2050, with an annual monetized impact of hundreds of millions of dollars,” the researchers wrote. They also noted that limiting greenhouse gas pollution “could both delay and substantially reduce adverse impacts to the winter recreation industry.”
A smaller, less reliable snowpack can also affect summertime recreation by reducing streamflows and reservoir levels that support fishing, boating and other water-based activities.
In Colorado, for example, outdoor recreation accounted for 3.2% of the state’s gross domestic product in 2023, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Boating and fishing generated $689 million in economic activity in the state, while snow-related recreation was valued at $1.56 billion—more than any other state.
Limited natural snow cover on a rainy Christmas Day in 2025 at Colorado’s Crested Butte ski area. As winters warm and precipitation increasingly falls as rain rather than snow, ski resorts face growing challenges. Photo by Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk.
Other benefits—and costs—of snow
The snowpack’s importance to winter recreation and the West’s water supply are among the easier values to quantify, but they’re not the only benefits snow provides.
On a global scale, one of the most valuable functions of frozen water is that it reflects far more sunlight than bare ground or open ocean. This reflectivity—a property known to scientists as albedo—helps cool the planet.
A 2013 study examining the thawing Arctic attempted to monetize the loss of that cooling effect. The decline in Arctic snow and ice—along with increased methane emissions from melting permafrost—was estimated to cost society $7.5 trillion to $91.3 trillion from 2010 to 2100. “The frozen Arctic provides immense services to all nations by cooling the earth’s temperature—the cryosphere is an air conditioner for the planet,” the scientists wrote.
Then again, the loss of snow could reduce some costs to society.
“There’s some side benefits,” Goldstein said. “You might not have a flood because you’re not going to have a massive runoff all at the same time. That does happen. Some things will be reduced.”
If snow disappeared, so too would snow days that disrupt travel and hamper economic productivity. Winter road maintenance accounts for roughly 20% of state transportation department maintenance budgets, according to the Federal Highway Administration, which estimates that state and local agencies spend more than $2.3 billion annually on snow and ice control annually.
Between 1980 and 2024, the United States experienced 24 winter storms that each caused more than $1 billion in damages, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. Collectively, those disasters cost $104.2 billion and claimed 1,453 lives.
While vehicle crashes, skier visits and acre-feet of snowmelt can be quantified and priced, snow’s benefits and costs also encompass many things that are difficult—if not impossible—to calculate.
In many ecosystems, for example, snow and snowmelt are vital for plants and animals that have their own economic value, not to mention their intrinsic worth. The 2017 snowpack study did not attempt to price these so-called ecosystem services, which include keeping forests healthy, maintaining cold-water fisheries and sustaining biological diversity.
Even more challenging to value are the mix of emotions that snow evokes. Beauty—and misery—are in the eye of the beholder.
“Some people want their white Christmas,” Lundquist said, “and others are like, please don’t shut down my city.”
The Colorado River, near Bond, Colorado, in December 2019. The river generated an estimated $1.4 trillion in annual economic activity, according to a 2014 report. Photo by Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk.
dWestwide SNOTEL basin-filled map February 6, 2026.
This historical photo shows the penstocks of the Shoshone power plant above the Colorado River. A coalition led by the Colorado River District is seeking to purchase the water rights associated with the plant. Credit: Library of Congress photo
Colorado water groups want a seat at the table to weigh in on a historic Western Slope bid to purchase powerful water rights tied to a small power plant on the Colorado River.
Cities, irrigation districts, hydroelectric companies and other groups submitted filings Friday to have a say in a water court case that will decide the future of Shoshone Power Plant’s rights to access water.
The Colorado River Water Conservation District submitted a request to the court in November to change the water rights tied to the power plant, a small facility tucked into Glenwood Canyon by Interstate 70. The water is used primarily to generate electricity, but the district wants to add an environmental use to help aquatic species during low flows or if the 117-year-old power plant a few miles east of Glenwood Springs were to shut down in the future.
Historically, groups have used opposition filings, like those made Friday, as a way to weigh in on water cases — it doesn’t necessarily mean they oppose all or any part of the proposal, the Colorado River District said.
The district declined further comment.
If the district’s bid is successful, it will end up buying the Shoshone’s water rights from an Xcel Energy subsidiary for about $99 million. The water rights would become the crown jewel of a state-led environmental preservation program and provide long-term certainty for water users across the state.
If the district cannot get court approval to change the water rights, it would scuttle the Colorado River District’s entire proposal.
Of the 60-plus parties in the case, some, like several major Front Range cities, have been concerned the water supplies for millions of people could be negatively impacted. Others filed mainly to watch or to support the effort.
These filings came from Western Slope irrigation districts, governments and water utilities, including Grand County, Breckenridge, Clifton Water District, Orchard Mesa Irrigation District, Summit County and Glenwood Springs.
“Eagle County filed as an ‘opposer’ because that is the term that’s used in water court for parties with an interest in the outcome of the case,” according to a statement from Eagle County staff. “In this case, the county has an interest in maintaining the existing Shoshone Water Rights flow regime as described in the application for change of water rights.”
Others watched to make sure their priorities were discussed during the hearings.
“Western Resources Advocates joined the Shoshone water rights change case as part of our ongoing work to preserve and improve the natural environment in the Colorado River in Colorado,” Bart Miller, WRA’s healthy rivers director, said in an email to The Colorado Sun.
The proposed change would also help support recommended flows for endangered fish many miles downstream, he said.
Some filings came from big water players on the Front Range who fought against the Colorado River District’s proposal during a state process to approve the environmental use. These include the city of Colorado Springs, Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, the city of Aurora and the city and county of Denver.
These groups have cited concerns that changes in the water rights at Shoshone could impact their own water supplies, which are used by over 2.5 million people up and down the Front Range.
Shoshone’s oldest water right is more senior than some of the Front Range water rights, which allows it to use water first. Under Colorado water law, junior rights get cut off first in dry years.
Adding an environmental use might mean Shoshone is using water more frequently or in larger amounts than in the past, the providers argued.
Others joined to better follow the case, like the city and county of Broomfield and Southwestern Water Conservation District. The district, like the Colorado River District, was formed by the state legislature to act as stewards of water resources on the Western Slope.
“Generally we are in favor of the Shoshone water change,” Steve Wolff, SWCD general manager, said. “We’re watching … how the water right ultimately may have a role in interstate matters.”
There is a lot to be determined about the future of Shoshone’s water rights.
The Colorado River District’s plan to buy the rights comes with four stipulations: state approval to use the water to help instream flows; a successful petition in water court to change the legal rights; $99 million to pay the bill; and approval from the Colorado Public Utilities Commission.
The court case will identify how much water could be used to benefit the environment and identify any potential ways a change could harmfully impact water flows to farmers, cities, utilities or other water users.
“From a legal perspective, this potentially could be a landmark water case,” Wolff said. “We will certainly be involved in it.”
Financing for a potential sale is still to be determined: In January 2025, the Bureau of Reclamation offered $40 million in federal funding through a program authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act. But President Donald Trump’s administration froze that funding.
If the Colorado River District gets its way in court, they’ll take it to the utilities commission for consideration. The entire process could take years to finalize.
Continued drought conditions plagued much of the region during January. After significant regional precipitation during the first week and a half of January, dry conditions dominated, and little precipitation fell during the remainder of the month. Consequently, regional snowpack and streamflow volume forecasts are extremely low. Record low statewide snowpack conditions exist in Colorado and Utah while Wyoming statewide SWE is 84% of average, driven by wetter conditions in western and northern Wyoming. While northern Wyoming streamflows are near to above average, much below average streamflow volumes are forecasted for the remainder of the region including Lake Powell which is forecasted to receive 38% of average inflow. With Lakes Mead and Powell storage hovering just above 25%, forecasts of low Colorado River flows, and continued Post-2026 Guidelines negotiations, 2026 is certain to be a challenging year for regional water managers.
January precipitation was much below normal for the majority of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming and over three-quarters of the region received less the 75% of average precipitation. Small areas of near average precipitation fell in all three states and eastern Colorado received 125-400% of average January precipitation.
Temperatures were above average across the entire region during January. January temperatures in all of Utah and Wyoming and large portions of Colorado exceeded three degrees above average. Northwestern Colorado, northeastern Utah and western Wyoming observed January temperatures that were six to twelve degrees above average.
February 1st snowpack conditions were poor across most of the region. Colorado and Utah snow water equivalent (SWE) was 55% of median at the start of February and at record low levels. Snowpack conditions in Wyoming are slightly better with 84% median SWE statewide. Western Wyoming river basins (Bighorn, Green, Snake, and Yellowstone) had near median SWE. Regional snowpack conditions generally deteriorate from north to south with the worst snowpack conditions in the Arkansas, Rio Grande, and San Juan River basins where less than 50% median SWE has accumulated. Real-time estimates of SWE based on satellite imagery suggest significantly poorer snowpack conditions compared to SNOTEL measurements of SWE. These spatial estimates of SWE often differ from SNOTEL SWE measurements because they capture SWE across the entire elevation range while SNOTEL measures SWE across a narrower elevation range. In Utah, February 1 river basin percent SWE varied from 12-54% of average; in Colorado, basin percent SWE ranged from 19-54%; and in Wyoming, basin SWE ranged from 4-110%.
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map February 5, 2026.
Seasonal streamflow volume forecasts for river basins in Colorado, Utah and southeastern Wyoming are much below average. Near to above average seasonal streamflow volumes are forecasted for much of Wyoming. In the Upper Colorado River Basin, streamflow volume forecasts ranged from 30-92% of average and seasonal inflow volume to Lake Powell is forecasted at 38% of average (2.4 million acre-feet). The Upper Green River Basin and other northern Wyoming basins (Big Horn, Powder and Yellowstone) are forecasted to receive 92-122% of average streamflow volumes. On the Great Basin side of the Wasatch Mountains and Plateaus of Utah, streamflow volume forecasts ranged from 35% of average for the Weber Basin to 54% of average for the Six Creeks watershed in Salt Lake County. Similarly, low streamflow volume forecasts were issued for the Arkansas (63%), Noth Platte (58%) and South Platte (76%) River Basins.
Dry and warm conditions during January caused regional drought coverage to increase to 63% (54% of region on 12/30/25). Drought conditions especially deteriorated in Colorado, where moderate drought emerged in northeastern and southwestern Colorado and severe drought expanded in western Colorado. The area of extreme and exceptional drought in the Colorado River headwaters increased in area during January. Drought emerged in eastern Wyoming and severe drought expanded in the southern portion of the state.
West Drought Monitor map February 3, 2026.
As of mid-January, La Niña conditions persist in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Pacific Ocean conditions are expected to warm and there is a 69% probability of neutral conditions emerging in the next two months. Despite the forecast for warming Pacific Ocean temperatures, ocean temperatures decreased slightly in late January. NOAA monthly forecasts for February suggest an increased probability for below average precipitation across the entire region and above average temperatures for Colorado, Utah and southwestern Wyoming. On the three-month timescale, NOAA forecasts indicate an increased probability of below average precipitation in southern Colorado and southern Utah. February-April temperatures are likely to be above average in Utah and southwestern Colorado.
Significant weather event: Upper Colorado River Basin drought. The Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB) began the 2026 water year with severe or extreme drought conditions covering nearly the entire watershed. Drought conditions have eased slightly, largely due to a wet October, but basin SWE is currently at 60% of median which is a record low (since 1986). If an average amount of SWE accumulates in the UCRB from February 10 to early April, then the 2026 peak SWE would remain low at 77% of average. Poor snow conditions and relatively dry soils throughout much of the UCRB have resulted in very low (38% of average) Colorado River inflow forecasts to Lake Powell. With a current Lake Powell elevation of 3,535 feet and poor Colorado River streamflow volume forecasts, low reservoir elevations will threaten Glen Canyon Dam’s ability to generate electricity by the end of 2026. The US Bureau of Reclamation’s 24-Month Study projects Lake Powell elevations two years into the future. Under the “Most Probable” scenario, Lake Powell elevation falls to 3,513 feet, just 23 feet above the elevation that the hydroelectricity-generating turbines must be shut down. Under the “Minimum Probable” scenario, reservoir elevations fall to 3,490.6 feet, just inches above the level that power generation at Glen Canyon Dam must cease. Operating Glen Canyon Dam is possible below 3,490 feet, but electrical generation must be bypassed and the alternate outlet for the dam was not engineered to run continuously. With Lakes Mead and Powell sitting at one-third and one-quarter full, only 15 million acre-feet (MAF) of combined water storage exists. However, only 6.3 MAF is available for consumption since nearly 9 MAF of water sits below the deadpool elevation of the reservoirs (Colorado River Research Group, “Dancing with Deadpool“). That means that current accessible storage in the two large reservoirs is less than one year of Lower Basin water deliveries from Lake Powell (7.5 MAF). While the UCRB has faced significant drought challenges over the last 25 years, current and forecasted conditions are taking the basin into truly unprecedented waters.
Colorado’s snowpack has remained at the zeroth percentile since about Jan. 15, 2026. While this snow telemetry data shows a record-low snowpack, longer term snow course measurements show the years of 1976-77 and 1980-81 may have been worse. Credit: NRCS
Click the link to read the article on The Aspen Times website (Ryan Spencer). Here’s an excerpt:
February 6, 2026
At some long-term snow measurement sites, the winters of 1976-77 and 1980-81 were worse than this year, but not by much
Across Colorado, the state’s array of snow telemetry, or SNOTEL systems, have documented record-low snowpack conditionsin numerous river basins and on a statewide level several times this winter. Since about Jan. 15, the snow telemetry system has had Colorado’s snowpack statewide sitting at the zeroth percentile, or the worst on record compared to the 30-year period from 1991 to 2020…
“We’ve been stuck for the most part in this warm and dry pattern across the West, going back really to the fall,” Colorado Climatologist Russ Schumacher said. “The snowpack numbers pretty much everywhere in Colorado are pretty ugly right now.”
Denver Water crews use a special tube [Federal Sampler] to gather snow samples near Winter Park as part of pre-set snow courses. Photo credit: Denver Water.
But going back in Colorado’s history, 1976-77 and 1980-81 are two winters often considered “the worst” for snow. Schumacher noted that the state’s snow telemetry system only began to be built out in the 1980s, so comparison can be difficult. That’s where snow course measurements come in. Snow course measurements, which have been taken by hand about once a month at some sites in Colorado since the 1930s, allow for more direct comparisons to those historically bad snow years.
“That allows you to actually make some comparisons to those really, really awful years from the 76-77, 80-81 that the longtimers there in the mountains will remember,” he said. “This year’s not as bad as those, but in a lot of places, it’s the second or third worst when you include those years.”
At Independence Pass, one site where snow course measurements have been taken for well over half a century, this is the second-worst snowpack on record, according to the data. The only year when Independence Pass had a worse snowpack was the winter of 1976-77. At a snow course measurement site in Blue River in Summit County that has about 70 years of data, this year was also the second-lowest snowpack on record, behind only the winter of 1980-81…Yet, at a snow course measurement site at Berthoud Pass, this year is only the 12th worst on record. The worst February snowpack on record at Berthoud Pass was, once again, during the winter of 1980-81.
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map February 5, 2026.
There is another emerging issue that decades of drought and the warming climate is causing in the San Luis Valley – elevated levels of heavy metals in drinking wells that can cause health issues for households that rely on them.
It’s a topic Kathy James, Ph.D., and associate professor with the Colorado School of Public Health, knows well after spending the past three years working with families in the Valley that rely on private drinking wells.
James provided an update to the work during Tuesday’s opening day of the 2026 Southern Rocky Mountain Ag Conference. She reported that 15 to 25 percent of the private groundwater wells used for drinking water in the San Luis Valley contain elevated levels of arsenic, uranium and other heavy metals.
Her confidence in the findings is bolstered by the fact that 850 households in the different counties of the Valley participated in the study and provided samples to help James and her team evaluate the effect drought is having on water quantity and water quality.
“The comprehensive information that we have about distribution of metals across the Valley is by far one of the best we’ve seen in most western states that do experience elevated metals,” James said.
She noted how low snowpack impacts the age of water underground and ultimately the quality of water people are drinking from a private well.
The Upper Rio Grande Basin, like the Colorado River, is suffering from snow droughtsin the high elevations of the west and below-normal spring runoff levels.
Less snow, less spring runoff for recharge of the aquifers, and higher levels of arsenic, uranium and other heavy metals is the emerging issue. James talks more about the study and the team’s findings in the next episode of The Valley Pod, which streams Wednesday on AlamosaCitizen.com.
Under pressure to provide water for drinking and irrigation, people around the globe are trying to figure out how to save, conserve and reuse water in a variety of ways, including reusing treated sewage wastewater and removing valuable salts from seawater.
But for all the clean water they may produce, those processes, as well as water-intensive industries like mining, manufacturing and energy production, inevitably leave behind a type of liquid called brine: water that contains high concentrations of salt, metals and other contaminants. I’m working on getting the water out of that potential source, too.
However, most of these methods require strict environmental protections and monitoring strategies to reduce harm to the environment.
For instance, the extremely high salt content in brine from desalination plants can kill fish or drive them away, as has happened increasingly since the 1980s off the coast of Bahrain.
Brine injected into the earth in Oklahoma, including into wells used for hydraulic fracking of oil and natural gas, was one of several factors that led to a 40-fold increase in earthquake activity in the five-year period from 2008 to 2013, as compared to the preceding 31 years. And wastewater has been documented to leak from the underground wells up to the surface as well.
Researchers like me are increasingly exploring brine’s potential not as waste but as a source of water – and of valuable materials, such as sodium, lithium, magnesium and calcium.
Currently, the most effective brine reclamation methods use heat and pressure to boil the water out of brine, capturing the water as vapor and leaving the metals and salts behind as solids. But those systems are expensive to build, energy-intensive to run and physically large.
Other treatment methods come with unique trade-offs. Electrodialysis uses electricity to pull salt and charged particles out of water through special membranes, separating cleaner water from a more concentrated salty stream. This process works best when the water is already relatively clean, because dirt, oils and minerals can quickly clog or damage the membranes, reducing the performance of the equipment.
Membrane distillation, in contrast, heats water so that only water vapor passes through a water-repelling membrane, leaving salts and other contaminants behind. While effective in principle, this approach can be slow, energy-intensive and expensive, limiting its use at larger scale.
A trailer containing a small water reclamation system. Mervin XuYang Lim, CC BY-SA
A look at smaller, decentralized systems
Smaller systems can be effective, with lower initial costs and quicker start-up processes.
At the University of Arizona, I am leading the testing of a six-step brine reclamation system known as STREAM – for Separation, Treatment, Recovery via Electrochemistry and Membrane – to continuously reclaim municipal brine, which is salty water left over from sewage treatment.
The system combines conventional methods such as ultrafiltration, which removes particles and microbes using fine filters, and reverse osmosis, which removes dissolved salts by forcing water through a dense membrane, alongside an electrolytic cell – a method not typically employed in water treatment.
Our previous study showed that we can recover usable quantities of chemicals such as sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid at one-sixth the cost of purchasing them commercially. And our initial calculations indicated the integrated system can reclaim as much as 90% of the water, greatly reducing the volume of what remains to be disposed. The cleaned water in turn is suitable for drinking after final disinfection using ultraviolet or chlorine.
We are currently building a larger pilot system in Tucson for further study by researchers. We hope to learn if we can use this system to reclaim other sources of brine and study its efficacy in eliminating viruses and bacteria for human consumption.
Utah’s cloud seeding program began in the early 1950s with initial winter experiments aimed at boosting snowfall in mountainous regions to enhance water supplies. These early efforts were part of broader U.S. weather modification initiatives following World War II discoveries about silver iodide’s role in nucleating ice crystals in supercooled clouds. By the 1970s, amid severe droughts in central and southern Utah, counties collaborated with the state to formalize operations, leading to the Cloud Seeding Act of 1973. This legislation empowered the Utah Division of Water Resources to regulate and fund programs, with North American Weather Consultants often handling implementation using ground-based silver iodide generators.1
The program’s foundational design targeted winter storms from November to April, releasing silver iodide particles from foothill and high-elevation sites to stimulate precipitation in key watersheds like the Uinta Mountains and central Utah ranges. Early operations in the 1973-74 season involved manual generators, with state funding starting in 1975-76 to match local contributions from participating counties such as Beaver and Sanpete. Evaluations drew from prior research, hypothesizing that seeding supercooled clouds would increase snowpack for spring runoff, and the program paused only briefly during non-drought periods but resumed consistently.2
Over decades, Utah expanded its efforts with partnerships like the Central Utah Water Conservancy District, supporting targeted areas including the West Uintas and Emery programs, while annual legislative appropriations—around $300,000 by 2021—ensured continuity. Aerial seeding with aircraft supplemented ground units in the late 1970s and 1980s, but ground-based methods proved more reliable and cost-effective. By the 2020s, amid ongoing water scarcity, the state ramped up investments, reflecting confidence in 5-15% snowfall increases backed by long-term data collection.3
Recent advancements have modernized the program into the world’s largest remote-controlled network, with 190 automated generators deployed statewide by 2025 for safer, faster activation during storms. Funding surged to nearly $16 million in 2025, enabling drone-based seeding pilots in challenging terrains like the La Sal Mountains, replacing prior airplane tests for precise cloud penetration. These innovations, overseen for environmental safety, align with Utah’s water policy to combat the impact of droughts for both agricultural and urban users.4
There was a strong west-to-east temperature gradient this week, with temperatures below normal in the East, particularly in the Midwest and Northeast, and above normal in the West. Precipitation was scarce across large portions of the nation, with many areas receiving less than 25% of normal precipitation. Areas of localized precipitation fell across the Pacific Northwest, northern Rockies and the Great Lakes region. Out east, a winter storm brought snow and mixed precipitation to parts of the Tennessee Valley and the Carolinas, with locally heavy snowfall in some locations.
Across the West, snowpack remains well below the seasonal average. Even in areas that received snow, low snowpack combined with dry soils and low streamflows led to degradations across the Intermountain West. Along the West Coast, precipitation remained limited and uneven. Western Oregon saw dry and drought conditions expand toward the Pacific coast and into far south Washington and northwest California.
Elsewhere, scattered degradations occurred across the South and Southeast, where another week without precipitation added to growing precipitation deficits, except for localized areas of improvement that continued to benefit from last week’s heavy snowfall. Other isolated areas of improvement were seen in southern New Mexico and in the Midwest and Northeast…
Conditions across the central and northern High Plains were mostly unchanged this week, as most of the region received little to no meaningful precipitation. Cold temperatures persisted, and where snow did fall, it remained largely frozen in place, limiting short-term benefits to soils or hydrologic conditions. Conditions across the Wyoming and Colorado Plains continued to deteriorate. Snow water equivalent (SWE) remains well below average, with SNOTEL data showing values generally in the 50 to 70 percent of median range, reflecting how snowpack continues to fall short for this time of year despite recent snowfall. Severe drought (D2) expanded from southeastern Wyoming into northeastern Colorado and a little into the Nebraska Panhandle. Abnormal dryness (D0) and moderate drought (D2) also expanded across portions of Kansas…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending February 3, 2026.
Across much of the West, conditions worsened, driven by a deepening snow drought, limited precipitation, and above-normal temperatures that continued to undermine snowpack development. While some mountain snowfall occurred, amounts were generally modest and failed to keep pace with early February climatological accumulation rates, causing snowpack deficits to expand across much of the region.
The Intermountain West saw conditions intensified as snow accumulation continues to fall well short of what is expected this time of the year. Numerous SNOTEL sites reported SWE below the 15th percentile, with several stations registering the lowest SWE on record for early February. These snowpack deficits were compounded by limited recent precipitation, declining soil moisture, and below-normal streamflows, particularly across northern Idaho and western Montana and extending into central and southern Montana and Wyoming. Similarly, Colorado and Utah saw conditions deteriorate as SWE levels are well below the median level along with drier soil moisture.
Across southwestern Idaho, northern Nevada and into eastern Oregon, persistent warmth, scarce precipitation, poor low-elevation snowpack, and low streamflows led to the expansion of abnormally dry (D0) and moderate drought (D1) conditions as well as the introduction of moderate drought (D2) along the Idaho-Wyoming border. SNOTEL stations in the Owyhee, Independence and Snake Mountains are reporting SWE levels between the ninth percentile to the worst on record…
Drought conditions across the South generally continued to worsen this week, as much of the region received little to no precipitation. Temperatures were near to slightly above normal across large portions of the region. Outside of a few localized improvements in northeast Louisiana and southeast Mississippi from last week’s winter storm, conditions continued to degrade across most of the region. Across the southern Plains into the Lower Mississippi Valley, one-category degradations were seen across parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and southwest Mississippi after another dry week with no meaningful precipitation. Short- to mid-term precipitation deficits continue to grow and soil moisture continues to decline, along with streamflows…
Looking Ahead
Over the next five to seven days, an active weather pattern is expected across much of the continental U.S., with several regions showing a strong signal for precipitation. The heaviest precipitation is forecast from the lower Mississippi Valley northeastward into the Ohio and Tennessee valleys, where widespread totals of 1 to 3 inches are expected, with locally higher amounts possible. Portions of the central Plains, Midwest, and Great Lakes are anticipated to receive generally 0.5 to 1.5 inches of precipitation during this period. Across the West, precipitation is expected to be widespread from the Pacific Northwest into the northern and central Rockies. Liquid-equivalent totals of 1 to 3 inches are forecast in the Cascades and northern Rockies, with locally higher amounts possible at higher elevations. Farther south into the Great Basin and Southwest, precipitation becomes more scattered, with most areas receiving less than 0.5 inches, and many locations remaining dry. Drier conditions are expected to persist across California, the northern Great Plains, central and southern Texas, and much of the Florida Peninsula, where little to no precipitation is forecast over the next week.
The Climate Prediction Center’s 6–10 day temperature outlook (Feb. 10-14) shows a strong and widespread signal for above-normal temperatures across much of the continental U.S. The highest probabilities of above-normal temperatures are centered over the central and southern Plains, extending northward into the northern Plains and Upper Midwest. Much of the Intermountain West, Rockies, and interior West also favors above-normal temperatures. Along the West Coast, temperatures are expected to be near normal, while parts of the Northeast show a transition from below normal in northern New England to near or above normal farther south. Portions of the Southeast, including Florida, are favored to see near-normal temperatures. Alaska shows a mix of near- to below-normal temperatures across the mainland, with near-normal conditions favored over the southern coast. Hawaii is favored to experience above-normal temperatures during this period.
The Climate Prediction Center’s 6–10 day precipitation outlook (Feb. 10–14) favors above-normal precipitation across much of the western U.S., including the Southwest and West Coast, with elevated probabilities extending into parts of the northern Rockies. Above-normal precipitation is also favored across Alaska and Hawaii during this period. In contrast, below-normal precipitation is favored across Florida and portions of the far Southeast, while much of the central U.S. is expected to see near-normal precipitation.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending February 3, 2026.
Just for grins here’s a slideshow of early February US Drought Monitor maps for the past few years.
With another federal deadline only weeks away and record-low snowfall further drying out the watershed, states have begun talking about whether they are prepared for litigation
Time and water are running low on the Colorado River.
Amid one of the driest winters on record, representatives from seven Western states have less than two weeks to meet an already-delayed federal deadline to find a new way to share the dwindling Colorado River—one that recognizes the megadrought and overconsumption plaguing the basin.
The current guidelines for implementing drought contingencies expire later this year, but as the Feb. 14 deadline looms, basin states, particularly Arizona and Colorado, have begun discussing the prospect of settling their disputes in court, suggesting that a deal is far from guaranteed. And while a meeting last week in Washington, D.C. between the Interior Department and all seven basin states brought some hope, state negotiators have again dug in their heels.
“I’ll certainly own whatever failure attaches [to me for] not having a seven-state agreement,” said Tom Buschatzke, the director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources and the state’s lead negotiator, in a meeting among the state’s stakeholders on Monday. “The only real failure for me, when I look in that mirror, is if I give away the state of Arizona’s water supply for the next several generations. That ain’t gonna happen, and I won’t see that as failure if we can’t come to a collaborative outcome. To me, that’s successfully protecting the state of Arizona.”
Those who hoped for a repeat of the winter of 2022-2023, when heavy snowfall across the West temporarily and partially replenished critical reservoirs, easing pressure on negotiators, are out of luck. With 2026’s winter about halfway over, it would take record amounts of snowfall for the Colorado River basin to climb back to merely average snowpack levels, said Eric Kuhn, the retired general manager of the Colorado River District and an author on Colorado River issues.
“People are mobilizing for potential litigation, and the question is, is somebody gonna pull a trigger?” Kuhn asked. “Hydrology may be the driving force. It may not be human action. It may be nature that forces us into litigation.”
The Colorado River basin spans parts of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming, and serves over 40 million people across the seven states, 30 tribes and Mexico. It contains dozens of watersheds, all but one of which—the Green River basin in Wyoming and slivers of Colorado and Utah—have experienced below-average or well below-average precipitation since October, when the new water year begins.
A storm in mid-January, which started in the West and brought several inches of snow to eastern parts of the country, did little to alleviate the drought.
“It’s a very critical situation right now,” Kuhn said. “This is climate change at work.”
Low Water, High Pressure
Low snowpack will result in less water melting into reservoirs across the basin come spring and summer. With less water stored, the Bureau of Reclamation’s options for managing the federal infrastructure along the river, including lakes Powell and Mead, the largest reservoirs in the nation, and their respective Glen Canyon and Hoover dams, will be constrained.
Loveland Pass in Summit County on Dec. 24, 2025. The lack of snow is clearly visible on the higher peaks. Photo credit: Denver Water.
The dams provide hydroelectricity for more than a million people in the Southwest, but must hold water well above the turbines that generate power. If water levels at Lake Powell dip below “minimum power pool” for an extended period of time the agency would have to bypass the turbines, turning off the electricity they produce, and deliver water to the Lower Basin through lower outlets on Glen Canyon Dam, which could compromise the structure. At that point, the Bureau of Reclamation would have to choose between damaging the second-highest concrete-arch dam in the U.S. or reducing water releases to Arizona, California and Nevada, which would be a devastating blow to the region’s cities and economy. Some experts have predicted that could happen as soon as next summer or sooner if this winter’s dry spell continues.
Last September, Kuhn and a consortium of other hydrologists and Colorado River experts authored a report that found that if the current winter was similar to last year’s, Colorado River users would overdraw the river by 3.6 million acre-feet, and there would need to be “immediate and substantial” reductions in water use across the basin to prevent a total collapse of the system. One acre-foot is enough to supply water to two to four households.
Now, with winter looking even more dismal than initially forecast, Kuhn says the Bureau of Reclamation’s options are “further constrained, unless things get wetter in the next two months.”
One option that Kuhn found likely was a big release from Flaming Gorge near the Wyoming-Utah border, the largest federally managed dam upstream of Lake Powell. He guessed the release could be anywhere from half a million to 1 million acre-feet of water.
While today’s drought and low streamflows are a product of nearly three decades of aridification, water forecasters cannot say for sure how climate change will impact future water supplies. Under some models, precipitation remains low and consistent, but rising temperatures dry out soils across the basin, leading them to absorb more snowmelt and further reduce streamflow.
Other hotter futures could also be wetter, Kuhn said, but this would not reinvigorate the river. “We’re expecting stream flows to continue their downward trend,” he said.
And if that is the case, Mother Nature may be the deciding factor between a successful negotiation and litigation.
Hydrologically speaking, we are living through a winter where “that’s a possibility,” Kuhn said. “I think it’s gotta put a lot of pressure on the states.”
Looming Litigation
A resolution in the courts is looking increasingly likely.
During her state of the state address on Jan. 12, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs said the “Upper Basin states, led by Colorado, have chosen to dig in their heels instead of acknowledging reality” during negotiations.
The state, she said, had established a $1 million legal fund in anticipation of litigation, with a bipartisan bill introduced to add another $1 million to it. This will “keep putting Arizona first and fight for the water we are owed,” she said.
“As negotiations continue, I refuse to back down.”
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs at signing ceremony November 19, 2024. Photo credit: ADWR
A week later, Colorado lawmakers asked Becky Mitchell, the state’s lead negotiator, about its prospects in litigation. “We are gonna have the best lawyer,” she said. “We will be ready.”
Earlier in the week, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser assured state lawmakers that he is prepared to go to court and blamed the other basin for the lack of a deal.
“The reason it’s hard to get a deal is you need two parties living in reality. And if one party is living in la la land, you’re not going to get a deal,” he said. “I’m committed to not getting a bad deal just to get a deal.”
The Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, and the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada sounded far apart on a deal at the annual Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas last December. Some negotiators advocated for a short-term agreement while others called for greater federal pressure.
Last week, negotiators from all seven basin states met in D.C. to try to break the impasse. After the meeting, governors Spencer Cox, of Utah, and Mark Gordon, of Wyoming, said in a joint statement that “all acknowledged that a mutual agreement is preferable to prolonged litigation,” and both felt encouraged by the results of the meeting.
In a separate statement, Arizona Gov. Hobbs said she was also encouraged, and that the states “reaffirmed our joint commitment to protecting the river.” Arizona has been and remains willing to continue bringing solutions, she added, “so long as every state recognizes our shared responsibility.”
Earlier this month, the federal government released a range of alternativesoutlining how it would manage the system if no deal is reached by Feb. 14. If that deadline passes without an agreement, the political and environmental situation across the basin may become as grim as the snowpack.
Arizona officials have said any of the federal government’s proposals would likely lead them to pursue litigation and that the Bureau of Reclamation’s draft Environmental Impact Statement puts all the risk of the river’s decline on the Lower Basin and does not comply with the bedrock law of the river. Under the outlined federal proposals, the vast majority of the cuts would affect Arizona, which relies heavily on the river for water but holds junior rights, often making it the first to face significant reductions. The state has already had a third of its water rights to the river cut.
“The entire weight of the river cannot fall on Arizonans, the Valley [Phoenix] and the Tucson metro areas,” said Brenda Burman, general manager of Central Arizona Project, the entity delivering Arizona’s Colorado River water, at a press conference Monday. “That’s not acceptable. We, as water managers … we will make sure that there is water flowing.”
The structural deficit refers to the consumption by Lower Basin states of more water than enters Lake Mead each year. The deficit, which includes losses from evaporation, is estimated at 1.2 million acre-feet a year. (Image: Central Arizona Project circa 2019)
The Lower Basin has volunteered to cut 1.5 million acre-feet, the amount of water lost to transpiration and evaporation in a year, and asked that the Upper Basin share in cuts after that amount. The Upper Basin, which has never used the full amount it is entitled to on paper, has proposed making only voluntary cuts to its use.
Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, said she’s felt litigation is increasingly likely since the basin states missed their initial federal deadline in the fall and their negotiations began to deteriorate.
“I believe that everybody has kind of stared it down and concluded that litigation isn’t such a horrible idea that it needs to be avoided,” she said.
As a former litigator, Porter said the threat of legal action may force both sides to develop their arguments along with facts and data supporting them, which could provide the clarity needed for a settlement. But a lawsuit would extend the uncertainty surrounding the region’s water supply, Porter said, affecting the planning of cities, tribes and farmers waiting for new guidelines.
Litigation would likely focus on one of the most crucial sections in the 1922 Colorado River Compact: Article III(d).
Under this part of the agreement, the Upper Basin “will not cause the flow of the river at Lee’s Ferry,” a point just south of Glen Canyon dam, “to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years.” Should the average flow at Lee’s Ferry fall below an average of 7.5 million acre-feet, which is a possibility given current hydrological conditions, the Lower Basin could sue the Upper Basin for failing to uphold this part of the compact.
“High-Stakes Poker”
Any lawsuit would be risky.
“That language has never been interpreted by a court,” said Anne Castle, a senior fellow at the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado and a former assistant secretary for Water and Science at the Interior Department. “This is high-stakes poker for both basins.”
The Lower Basin would presumably argue that Article III(d) means the Upper Basin has an obligation to deliver water, so it would have to adjust its consumption to ensure the Lower Basin receives 7.5 million acre-feet annually.
But the Upper Basin could counter that Article III(d) only prohibits it from overconsuming the river and leaving less than 7.5 million acre-feet at Lee’s Ferry, and climate change is actually responsible for the meager flows. In that case, they would bear no obligation under the compact to make cuts.
Porter said the Upper Basin’s interpretation flies in the face of history. The whole reason the compact exists was the fear California would take all of the river’s water at the time, she said, because that’s where the growth was.
“It is silly to think that California would agree to a deal with the Upper Basin that said they have no responsibility to leave water for California,” she said.
For decades, the Upper Basin cited its delivery obligation to California, Arizona and Nevada to justify building a series of dams and reservoirs above Lake Powell, Porter said.
“There’s a huge amount of evidence that the Upper Basin states … needed those reservoirs upstream because they had an obligation to deliver water to the Lower Basin,” she said.
Even if Congress originally authorized Upper Basin reservoirs to help satisfy provisions in the compact, “that doesn’t tell us what those obligations actually are,” Castle said. “Fixed number obligations don’t work with a changing climate that is causing shrinking flows.”
Not every state is eager to initiate litigation. Wyoming Senior Assistant Attorney General Chris Brown appeared before state lawmakers in January and warned of the pitfalls of letting Congress or the Supreme Court dictate what happens on the river.
Still, “as a headwater state, Wyoming has a long history of zealously defending its rights to use interstate waters, and the rights of its water users,” Brown said in an email. “The Colorado River is no different.”
Tina Shields, water manager for the Imperial Irrigation District, which is California’s biggest and most senior water rights holder, said in a statement that the state continues to work on finding a consensus agreement among all the states that depend on the Colorado River, but could not comment on the status of those negotiations.
“The Colorado River hydrology is unlikely to wait for a court decision, so any speculation about litigation is premature,” she said.
Although Arizona’s Lower Basin counterparts have not touted litigation as an option, Buschatzke said he is confident they will support the state, as compliance with Article III(d) affects them too, though less severely.
And the states may not be the only entities to sue. Under a 2004 water settlement, the Gila River Indian Community receives 653,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water a year, a significant allocation. But getting that water depends on the Central Arizona Project (CAP) not getting its water allotment cut.
Any unilateral action by the Department of the Interior to reduce that flow “would, in our view, constitute a blatant violation of the United States trust responsibility to protect our CAP water as established by Congress under the Arizona Water Settlement Act,” said Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis at the Arizona meeting of water stakeholders.
While litigation may clear up some of the murkier language in the compact, Castle wasn’t sure that it is the best way forward for the river’s stakeholders—particularly since these kinds of disputes can take years to resolve.
“We might get answers to a few questions after years,” she said, “but we have a river to operate in the meantime.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
I don’t know if the groundhog saw its shadow yesterday or not (I can never remember whether the shadow is a sign of an early spring or a late one, anyway). But one thing is certain if the little dude was in the Western U.S.: He didn’t see much snow.
Ruh roh. Not looking good out there. Source: NASA.
Officially, meteorological winter ends in less than four weeks from now. In reality, the snowy season hasn’t really begun in much of the western swath of the nation. The aggregate snowpack at 130 monitoring sites across the Upper Colorado River Basin is at its lowest level for Feb. 1 in the last 40 years. Meaning, yes, it is even worse than in 2002, often considered the Winter of the Colorado’s Discontent, and is on a par with 2018.
The high-country snowy season can last until mid-June, so there’s plenty of time for a rebound, and a return to near normal conditions by April would not be unprecedented. The problem is that this year’s snow drought is the result not only of a lack of precipitation, but also unusually warm temperatures. A rebound, then, would require a major shift in both precipitation and temperature patterns, very soon, which to this amateur weather watcher seems pretty unlikely.
Snowpack in the Animas River watershed is tracking slightly better than in 2018 for this date, but is lagging behind 2002, which was one of the worst winters on record and was followed by a dry, fire-plagued summer (including the Missionary Ridge Fire).
This, of course, is very bad news for the beleaguered Colorado River. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s January projections find that Lake Powell could drop below minimum power pool as soon as this December if the snowpack curve doesn’t veer up sharply in the next several weeks. The Rio Grande isn’t looking much better, snow-wise.
During the summer of 2021, farmers’ ditches in the Four Corners area ran dry as early as June, and the Bureau of Reclamation drew down Upper Basin reservoirs such as Blue Mesa and Flaming Gorge to help prop up Lake Powell’s surface elevation. If current trends continue, this year’s spring runoff threatens to be even slimmer. It could be a tough summer for irrigators, boaters, and anyone else who relies on abundant streamflows.
2014 Recapture protest. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Early on a May morning in 2014, I loaded my camera and notebook and myself into the Silver Bullet — my 1989 Nissan Sentra with a duct-taped window — and headed west to Blanding, Utah. Phil Lyman, a San Juan County Commissioner at the time, was planning on leading a convoy of OHV-riders along a closed-to-motorized-vehicle trail on public land in Recapture Canyon to protest what he called “federal overreach.” I was going to observe and report on the event.
I would lying if I said I wasn’t anxious. After all, this was just weeks after a heavily armed group of yahoos had descended on the Bundy Ranch in southern Nevada to stop Bureau of Land Management agents from rounding up cattle grazing illegally on federal land. If the BLM, or environmentalists, tried to interfere with Lyman’s lawbreaking, it could lead to an armed conflict — and I could get caught in the middle.
I’ve been thinking about that protest, the events that led up to it, and the general political atmosphere at the time. And about the similarities and vast differences of what’s happening today.
After Lyman had posted his plans on the Bundy Ranch Facebook page, commenters’ responses included statements like these:
“The BLM is about to learn they can’t push people around any more in the West. Our backs are up against a wall push back! Yet another case of the federal government taking tyrannical control of the people. They need to be put down and put down hard.”
“Why is the BLM still around? If they so much as throw a stone in your way, light ‘em up. Time to quite defending, being ever gnawed at, and go on offense. … Strike while you are still strongest.”
My unease only grew when I arrived at Centennial Park on the town’s southern fringe, where a pre-protest rally was getting underway. It was peopled by a contingent of locals and an equally large number of out-of-towners, many of whom were part of the Bundy group. This included Ryan Bundy, Cliven Bundy’s son, who circulated pocket versions of the U.S. Constitution, peppered with scripture, published by the National Center for Constitutional Studies, a right-wing organization. And Ryan Payne, a so-called militia leader, who told a reporter that during the Bunkerville standoff he had positioned snipers with their sights trained on federal employees: “If they made one wrong move, every single BLM agent in that camp would’ve died.”
Lyman and others spoke at the event, airing their grievances and reasons for protesting. Like the folks in Minneapolis today, their rhetoric suggested, these people were resisting a federal government that had slipped into tyranny and was taking away their Constitutional rights. “They target a community, they targeted Blanding,” Lyman said, (much as the Trump administration has targeted Democratic-leaning cities) adding that the feds had then sent jackbooted thugs in to harass and intimidate its residents. In the speeches, on the signs, and in comments from the crowd in Blanding, I heard words such as “despot,” “dictator,” “tyranny,” and “gestapo.”
***
***
What inspired such outrage in Blanding? For Lyman and friends, examples of “tyranny” and federal overreach included:
The BLM had prosecuted and fined two local men for constructing an OHV trail in Recapture Wash in 2005, a crime that included chopping down old-growth junipers, building a bridge across the creek, installing culverts, and using heavy machinery to clear a path through the riparian zone that was rich with cultural resources.
Then the BLM banned motorized vehicles on that section of Recapture.
In June 2009 the feds raided several homes of Blanding residents suspected of gathering or dealing in artifacts found on public land in violation of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. This included at least one SWAT team equipped in tactical gear, responding to a potential threat, though they did not wear masks to conceal their identities. Included among those arrested was James Redd, a local physician. A day later, he killed himself; his family later sued the BLM for intentional infliction of emotional distress and wrongful death, but the case was dismissed.
In 2010, the Obama administration floated the idea of establishing a national monument on public land on Cedar Mesa, west of Blanding, sparking an uproar among the anti-federal land management movement.
And in 2008, the BLM subtly changed its resource management plan from considering all trails on public lands being open to motorized travel unless otherwise closed, to closing all trails unless specifically designated as open to motorized travel.
Lyman had organized this protest, and the Bundy crowd had joined, to push back against this. Was this enough to justify a protest? In my opinion: yes. These people were displeased with the federal government’s actions, so they were exercising their First Amendment right to demonstrate peacefully. And they would — like Henry David Thoreau before them — break the law, or practice civil disobedience and risk fines or jail time, to make their point.
Many of the attendees were also exercising their Second Amendment right to bear arms, from the older cowboy-hatted man with a six-shooter, to the young buck in an “American Venom” t-shirt with an AR-15, to the buzz-cut dude with a “REGULATOR” neck tattoo, a Glock semi-automatic sidearm holstered to his thigh, and a t-shirt that read: “United States Militia … Molon Labe.”
At one point during the pre-ride rally, after a shouted dialogue among the attendees in which they threatened any unfriendly journalists that might be among the crowd, an older man spoke up: “We have a treasure, a jewel, and it has been mugged. It’s been stolen from us by people back east. They have stolen our treasure. We have to stop this BLM police state. They come into our town, raiding our town …”
“You’ve got guns, too, by God, that’s what they’re for,” said another voice from the crowd.
***
A little while later, I was hoofing it down Recapture Canyon in an effort to get ahead of the protesters, most of whom would be on motorized three- or four-wheelers. The vehicles are allowed in the first mile or so of the canyon, meaning at that point it would be just a protest, not an act of civil disobedience. If the BLM was going to have its line of riot cops anywhere, it would likely be at the sign marking the motorized closure.
I was only a few hundred yards down the dusty two track when the incessant buzz of two-stroke engines alit on the air. I walked to the side to avoid getting squashed by one of them and snapped photos as one after another buzzed past, their diesel exhaust mingling with the pungent aroma of sage and dust.
A man driving a four-wheeler with a woman sidled up behind him slowed to a stop next to me, causing me to jump. “Hop on,” the man said, motioning to the little cargo area on the back. As we cruised down canyon, the woman asked who I reported for, and whether I was “for us, or against us.” “I’m a freelancer,” I said. “And I’m for the Truth.”
A crowd of OHVers coalesced at the motorized-ban line and my ride slowed to a stop, allowing me to jump off and capture some pictures. There were no flak-jacket-equipped BLM agents here, no riot cops, no tear gas. Just a few San Juan County Sheriff’s deputies, who made no motion to stop or discourage the protesters, even as they continued on past the line in violation of federal rules.
It may strike some folks as off to see a law enforcement officer watching idly as someone breaks the law right in front of them. It’s not. In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Printz v. United States that the federal government cannot compel state or local law enforcement to enforce federal regulations.
**
I continued past the non-motorized line on foot, following in the dust of the OHV convoy. From what I could tell all or almost all of the attendees chose to break the law that day, though most of them stopped at the end of the two-track and beginning of a more primitive trail that passes over archaeological sites.
While I had been anxious about my safety, given the large number of firearms and the intensity of the crowd’s hostility toward the press, I never worried that I would be arrested or detained or tear-gassed by federal agents simply for being present and observing. The same would be true even if I had stayed on the back of the OHV after its driver passed the non-motorized line.
That’s because I was there doing my job as a journalist, and any Democratic government with an inkling of respect for the U.S. Constitution would acknowledge and respect that, and allow me to do my job (while not always making it easy to do so) without fear of government reprisals.
But that was almost 12 years and a few administrations ago. Now, the government is attacking the First Amendment and, really, pretending it simply doesn’t exist. Last month, journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort entered a Minneapolis church to cover a protest against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, just as I had accompanied the Recapture protesters to cover that event. This time, though, the feds arrested Lemon and Fort and charged them with violating federal law, not long after Trump had reposted a social media post calling for Lemon’s arrest. Prosecutors accused Lemon of peppering the pastor — who also works for ICE — with questions. He was doing his job, in other words, which, under Trump, is apparently a federal offense and could even get him labeled a domestic terrorist.
**
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at the Trump administration’s authoritarianism.They promised this, after all, both at campaign rallies and in Project 2025, which the administration has followed closely. But I must say I am a bit surprised that almost none of the folks yelling about federal overreach and tyranny back in the Recapture protest days are speaking up, even mildly.
Lyman is Xeeting about the Gestapo, it’s true, but his target is not masked ICE or CPB agents running amok or even Greg Bovino in his Nazi-esque long coats, but the Utah Department of Natural Resources law enforcement division. Even “Sheriff” Richard Mack, who was a plaintiff in the Printz case, has remained silent or supported the administration’s actions.
It’s disappointing and unmasks the hypocrisy within the Sagebrush Rebellion and its ideological successors. I believe that, early on, the so-called Rebellion’s motives were honest. They saw the public lands as the manifestation of freedom and liberty, they resented having an absentee landlord take those freedoms away, and they stood up to the powers that be — regardless of party or creed — and resisted. But it is now abundantly clear that the movement was long ago hijacked, not only by the extractive industries, but also by the ideologues and demagogues. The old battle cries of Liberty and Freedom and Don’t Tread on Me are no more than empty slogans, the pocket Constitutions that they carry alongside their firearms carry less weight for them than the paper they’re printed on.
Study sites. (a–c) Nanika catchment in Western British Columbia, Canada. (d–f) Krycklan catchment in the boreal region of northern Sweden. (a, d) Satellite images and boundaries of Nanika and Krycklan. The red circle and yellow square show the locations of the catchment outlet and streamflow measurement station, respectively. (b, e) Topographic map showing the elevational pattern of both catchments. Note the distinct elevational ranges in the two catchments. (c, f) The distribution of slopes in the two catchments, reflecting a larger portion of very steep locations (∼100% or 45°) in the Nanika vs. Krycklan. Slope and elevation maps were generated at 90-m and 30-m resolution for Nanika and Krycklan, respectively.
Understanding how snowmelt is partitioned into different hydrologic flowpaths/storages—and how this partitioning varies over time—is essential for predicting water availability and quality under climate variability. In this study, we examine the time-variance of snowmelt partitioning patterns (SPP) in response to interannual variations in antecedent (Fall) rainfall before snowmelt seasons, across two snow-dominated catchments in Canada and Sweden with contrasting geologic and topographic features. Using integrated subsurface–surface flow and transport modeling, combined with observational data, we simulate the partitioning of snowmelt into shallow flowpath, deep flowpath, evapotranspiration, and long-term storage. To generalize our findings beyond the two case studies, we design a suite of virtual experiments that systematically vary catchment slope and the extent of the hydraulic conductivity’s vertical and lateral heterogeneity. Results show that lateral heterogeneity in conductivity mediates the sensitivity of snowmelt partitioning to interannual variations in antecedent rainfall. While laterally homogeneous catchments display minimal sensitivity of snowmelt partitioning pattern to wet or dry Fall rainfall conditions, catchments with heterogeneous lateral structure store a significantly larger portion of snowmelt and reduce snow-sourced shallow flow contributions in years with high pre-snow rainfall than years with low pre-snow rainfall. In contrast, while slope and vertical conductivity architecture govern SPP, they play a limited role in mediating SPP’s temporal sensitivity to antecedent rainfall variability. These findings reveal that subsurface structure—including the extent of lateral subsurface heterogeneity—modulates the influence of climate variability on snowmelt partitioning and catchment hydrologic function. This has implications for predicting streamflow responses, groundwater recharge, and solute transport under changing climate regimes, and highlights the importance of representing time-variable hydrologic behavior in hydrologic models.
Plain Language Summary
Knowledge of how snowmelt moves through a watershed is essential for managing water supplies and ecosystems in snow-dominated regions. Snowmelt can either run quickly to streams or infiltrate to recharge groundwater, and this balance shifts from year to year with climate and watershed structure. We studied two snowy watersheds that differ in slope and subsurface properties to test how late-summer/fall rainfall (which sets pre-snowmelt wetness) shapes winter snowmelt pathways. In steep terrain with horizontally variable (patchy) subsurface hydraulic conductivity, dry pre-snowmelt conditions direct meltwater horizontally to streams, whereas wetter pre-snowmelt conditions favored deeper infiltration and storage. To generalize, we ran virtual experiments that systematically altered the extent of horizontal variability of hydraulic conductivity. A consistent signal emerged: patchy subsurface hydraulic conductivity produced stronger year-to-year swings in how snowmelt is partitioned between runoff and storage, while horizontally uniform subsurface hydraulic conductivity led to more predictable, stable watershed responses. These results show that antecedent wetness and the horizontal structure of subsurface permeability jointly control the time-variability of snowmelt partitioning. Incorporating these controls can improve forecasts of streamflow and groundwater recharge, and guide planning for flood and drought risks in snow-dependent watersheds under increasing climate variability.
Key Points
Pre-snow rainfall variability alters snowmelt partitioning pattern (SPP) into storage versus runoff, with the magnitude of impact mediated by the extent of hydraulic conductivity’s lateral heterogeneity
Catchments with greater lateral heterogeneity in hydraulic conductivity store (release) a larger (lesser) portion of snowmelt in years with large pre-snow rainfall
Slope and vertical conductivity architecture influence SPP but exhibit limited modulation of SPP temporal sensitivity to pre-snow rainfall variability
A UC Davis study on the Salton Sea air basin found that nitrogen oxide emissions from soils (driven by fertilizer use, irrigation, and heat) were underestimated in the official inventory by about a factor of ten. Soil NOx emissions averaged 11 tons per day, ten times the state inventory value.1 Recent work and briefs using the Salton Sea Environmental Time Series data show that nitrogen levels in the Salton Sea water column are extremely high (higher than 95% of U.S. lakes) and that government monitoring systems are missing much of the nutrient-related and hydrogen sulfide–related hazard, but they emphasize incomplete or spatially biased monitoring.2
Nitrates entering the Salton Sea primarilydrive hazardous air pollution indirectly through eutrophication and microbial processes, rather than as direct airborne nitrates.3 Nitrates from fertilizers applied in the surrounding Imperial and Coachella Valleys are taken up by arid soils, where microbial processes (nitrification and denitrification) convert them to nitrogen oxides (NOx), a key precursor to ground-level ozone (O3) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5).4
These soil NOx emissions in the Salton Sea Air Basin have been measured at 11 tons per day on average—about 10 times higher than prior state inventories—exacerbating nonattainment of federal air quality standards for ozone and PM.5 Intensive irrigation and fertilizer use amplify these pulses, especially under rising temperatures, linking agricultural nitrate management directly to regional air pollution budgets.6 High nitrate inflows fuel algal blooms, whose decomposition under low-oxygen conditions produces hydrogen sulfide (H2S) gas via sulfate-reducing bacteria.7 H2S routinely exceeds health-based thresholds (e.g., 30 ppb) around the Sea, causing odors, respiratory irritation, headaches, and potential asthma exacerbation in nearby communities like Slab City and Mecca.8 Recent UCLA studies using high-frequency sensors confirmed persistent H2S elevations tied to nitrate-driven nutrient richness, with inadequate monitoring missing peak events.9 NOx from soil and other sources forms secondary nitrate aerosols (part of PM2.5 and PM10), worsening inhalable particulate pollution already heightened by dust from the receding shoreline.10
While playa dust carries salts, metals, and legacy pesticides independently, nutrient overload indirectly worsens air quality by sustaining a chemically reactive lake environment.11 These combined pollutants contribute to chronic respiratory and cardiovascular risks in the low-population but agriculturally intense basin.12
Carly Jerla speaking at the Colorado River Water User’s Association Conference December 5, 2024. Photo credit: USBR
From email from Brian McNeece:
January 27, 2026
Colorado River negotiations have bogged down, but dozens of experts at the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) have been streaming right along. On Jan. 14, the BOR released its draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which is bureaucratese for a report on options for the negotiators after the current rules expire this year.
It’s a bit complicated. The report includes a modeling of 1,200 possible future scenarios for the entire Colorado River system and runs 1,600 pages. Just the Executive Summary is 66 pages. The theme of this massive undertaking is deep uncertainty. In fact, that is the name of the modeling process: Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty.
What’s uncertain? Well, in a word: the weather. And not just the weather, but also population growth and water use patterns. Most scientists agree that climate change includes aridification, or a general drying of the Colorado River basin, but it’s impossible to quantify reliably. Thus the 1,200 futures.
This massive report took two and a half years to compile with the help of around 150 people with expertise in everything from hydrology to chemical engineering to wildlife management to socioeconomics to anthropology to law. Browsing through it, I marveled at the depth of analysis and the advanced computational and mathematical tools brought to bear on a question, which at the end of the river, is a political one. I thought, does anyone understand all of it? But when I looked at the top of the list of preparers, I realized that yes, someone does.
And that is Carly Jerla. She’s the Senior Water Resources Program Manager for the Bureau of Reclamation. Ms. Jerla was hired by the BOR in 2005 as a graduate student at the University of Colorado’s Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems. She is trained in civil and environmental engineering and public policy. Twenty years on, she’s the boss of this effort.
I’ve watched Ms. Jerla in action at several of the recent Colorado River Water Users Association (CRWUA) conferences in Las Vegas. A petite woman, Carly has a disarmingly low, warm voice. Speaking to a crowd of 1,700 people, she talks as if she’s having an over-the-fence conversation with a neighbor. But as the overlays of data stacked up on her slides, I could sense her losing the audience. It was just too much.
We saw a draft of the current report in 2024. Since then, it has grown massively, but the same dilemma exists and can actually be summed up simply. In re-writing the rules for how the water of the river gets divvied up, they need to decide what triggers shortage conditions, how much cuts each contractor must take under those conditions, and where shortages are measured. In the past, Lake Mead and Lake Powell had separate conditions, and the reservoirs above Lake Powell were not in play. Ms. Jerla’s report emphasizes that the entire system should be considered in the rules, not just the two giant reservoirs.
There are currently five major alternatives being proposed. This first one, called the No-Action Alternative, is also the no-go alternative, since it returns us to the world prior to the 2007 guidelines for shortages. The No-Action Alternative would drain the reservoirs. So negotiators must choose one of the other four alternatives. All of them make heavy cuts, either based on prior appropriation (i.e. the Law of the River) or pro rata (i.e. proportional cuts for everyone).
Is there a Goldilocks alternative among the other four? One that splits the difference between the historical, asymmetrical Law of the River and the fairness in a pro rata plan? No, there isn’t. That’s why we’re stuck.
There’s one future scenario that is completely omitted from the alternatives. Colorado’s negotiator Becky Mitchell has repeatedly called for the Upper Basin states to get MORE water. She points out that the Colorado River Compact of 1922 allocated the Upper Basin the same amount allocated to the Lower Basin states — 7.5 million acre feet. But that’s 3 million more acre-feet than the Upper Basin has ever drawn from the system.
None of the five alternatives, and apparently not one of Carly Jerla’s 1,200 possible futures, includes that premise. So if the Upper Basin negotiators are staking their claim on the river to include more water for them, they are way off the mark. Their next best hope is to take no cuts, but that option won’t float in the Lower Basin.
Trying to make a decision under Deep Uncertainty is tough, tough work. Carly Jerla and her team have laid out the buffet for the representatives from the states along the Colorado River. Time to pick from the menu.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
“Ken Neubecker, a long-time Colorado River observer affiliated with environmental groups, said mandatory cuts to Colorado River water use would require an amendment to Colorado’s state constitution and likely those of other upper-basin states. Colorado’s constitution has been… https://t.co/qwkPJDPF7G
Vallecito Dam is due for some serious upkeep…But aging materials and erosion have caused significant damage to the dam’s emergency support structures, and a major repair project is coming down the pipeline sometime in the next several years.
“We’ve got this issue and we know it’s here. It hasn’t been clandestine; we’ve told people about it forever,” said Ken Beck, superintendent of the Pine River Irrigation District. “But it’s a nail-biter for a superintendent and dam tender.”
PRID operates, maintains and manages Vallecito Dam and Reservoir, which holds and delivers supplemental irrigation water to 65,000 acres of land downstream – the lifeblood for ranchers and farmers who hold water rights with the district…The repair project – about which little has been decided beyond the fact that it must happen – will be a massive undertaking. Beck estimated it could take roughly two to four years to complete once ground is broken, likely changing some of the regular operations of the reservoir. There is the potential that irrigators, ranchers and farmers who rely on consistent water deliveries would feel some impact – but Beck said how much and if at all is dependent on a variety of factors, like the weather and the time of year when the construction is done…The project is also important from the standpoint of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, which is entitled to one-sixth of the reservoir’s total storage capacity. That water is used primarily for tribal agriculture and water management…
The primary issue is the dam’s upper spillway, a critical safety structure designed to release water during extreme runoff or flood events. Vallecito’s upper spillway includes three radial gates and a concrete chute that carries water to be released downstream safely without damaging the dam itself. Any damage to that infrastructure is a critical issue, and can compromise the dam’s ability to manage high water and protect downstream communities…In 2017, PRID conducted a dye test to assess the spillway’s integrity, Beck said. Dye placed upstream later appeared in areas downstream where it should not have surfaced if the structure were intact, confirming that water was migrating beneath the concrete spillway.
That process – known as “piping” – can carry sediment out from under the structure and weaken its foundation. After the dye test, the Bureau of Reclamation launched a series of investigations that revealed large underground voids – some as large as 4 by 10 feet – beneath portions of the spillway. Beck said it was determined the upper spillway is unsafe to use except in dire emergencies, because uncontrolled flows could accelerate erosion and threaten the dam’s integrity.
Federal Water Tap is a weekly digest spotting trends in U.S. government water policy. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.
The Rundown
South Dakota representatives introduce three bills to authorize feasibility studies for regional water supply projects, including two Missouri River diversions.
BLM revises its publication date for a final environmental assessment of a proposed groundwater pipeline in southwest Utah.
White House advisory group recommends changes to FEMA’s disaster response.
USGS researchers assess a less-toxic means of controlling a non-native, ecologically-damaging reed in the Great Lakes.
And lastly, a federal financial oversight board’s annual report notes that the Trump administration removed climate-risk guidance for large financial institutions.
“The associated mission drift can also lend itself to political ends, such as excessive focus on climate risk and the effective debanking of certain industries. Collectively, this increases distraction and compliance costs while impeding responsible lending and risk-taking.” – Excerpt from the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s 2025 annual report. The council, established after the 2007-09 financial crisis, oversees the nation’s banking system. The report argues that the council should focus on “material financial risks” instead of things like climate risk. Last year, the Trump administration retracted federal climate-risk guidance that applied to financial institutions with more than $100 billion in assets, saying it was “distracting.”
By the Numbers
11: Features that the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Interior should incorporate into their agreements with tribes that would strengthen tribal co-management of land and waters, according to a Government Accountability Office report. The features include clear definition of roles and goals, dispute resolution, and accountability. The three agencies signed a joint order in 2022 to collaborate with tribes on natural resources management.
News Briefs
Water Bills in Congress Representatives in the western states introduced several water-supply bills in the last week.
South Dakota’s delegation introduced a trio of bills in the House and Senate that would require the Interior Department to study the feasibility of new or expanded rural water supply projects in that state and its neighbors. One study, authorized at $10 million, regards a potential diversion of Missouri River water to the growing Rapid City area. This bill failed in the previous Congress. Another bill is to study a potential Missouri River diversion to a separate regional water system in eastern South Dakota, Iowa, and Minnesota. Still another bill is to study an expansion of the Lewis and Clark rural water system, which extends into Iowa and Minnesota and has been under construction for more than two decades.
Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ) is seeking to protect his state in the tussle over the Colorado River. His bill would require proportional cutbacks among Arizona, California, and Nevada, instead of relying on the Supreme Court’s decreed rights, which do not favor Arizona.
Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) introduced a bill to establish a $15 million per year grant program for “natural water retention and release” projects that hold water in aquifers and floodplains.
Studies and Reports
Proposed FEMA Changes A White House advisory group is preparing to recommend an overhaul in how FEMA distributes post-disaster aid, according to Politico’s E&E News.
A draft of the plan would shift post-disaster funding to a “parametric” model – paying out based on thresholds like river height and wind speed – rather than the current one that is derived from estimated loss and damage.
The change would prioritize speed over precision, disaster aid experts told the news site.
Great Lakes Phragmites Fight Phragmites is a reedy, non-native wetland plant that has grown into dense, ecologically-damaging clusters along Great Lakes shorelines.
Weedkillers are a common management strategy, but U.S. Geological Survey researchers contributed to a study that assessed a less toxic alternative.
They found that “cut-to-drown” – cutting phragmites stems below water – was an effective way of “drowning the plant and depleting its stored resources.”
On the Radar
Senate Cybersecurity Hearing On February 4, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works will hold a hearing on cybersecurity for America’s water infrastructure systems. Witnesses include a researcher and water utility representatives.
Southwest Utah Groundwater Pipeline The Bureau of Land Management now expects to publish a final environmental impact statement for the Pine Valley Water Supply Project on February 27, 2026.
The initial publication date of November 2025 was delayed due to the government shutdown.
The project is a 70-mile pipeline to pump 15,000 acre-feet of water per year from wells in Beaver County to customers in neighboring Iron County.
American consumers are well aware that their electric bills have been going up, in some areas dramatically.1 The construction of AI data centers have been widely blamed for this, even though (at present) they’re responsible for only a small part of the increase. In Phoenix and Chandler Arizona – two of the nation’s hottest and driest cities – enormous factories are being built to fabricate the semiconductors used in those data centers, and they’re widely expected to drive up costs that local residents pay for both electricity and water. Since the increased costs are shared by all rate payers, it can be said that residents of Maricopa County who pay for water and power are subsidizing the cost of water and power used by these new industries.7
Water Usage Concerns
TSMC’s Phoenix plant is projected to consume over 17 million gallons a day. Critics from groups like Chip Coalition United argue this adds pressure to local supplies, potentially raising municipal costs despite recycling pledges (e.g., TSMC’s near-zero discharge goal). Phoenix officials counter with investments like a 70,000 acre-foot recycling facility by 2030 to offset shortfalls.4
The new Intel semiconductor plant in Chandler, Arizona (part of expansions at the Ocotillo campus), obtains its water from the City of Chandler. This supply is drawn from the Colorado River, Verde River, Salt River, and some groundwater sources.8 Intel heavily recycles water at its Chandler facilities, treating up to 9.1 million gallons daily on-site and returning much of it to the city or aquifer via partnerships like the Ocotillo Brine Reduction Facility. The company achieves high reuse rates (over 90% in some reports), minimizing net freshwater demand.9
Power Demand Impact
TSMC’s facility alone could require electricity for 300,000 homes, straining Arizona’s grid and emitting gases rivaling 32,000 households. Intel’s Chandler expansions add further load, prompting calls for full environmental reviews. No sources confirm explicit resident bill hikes yet, but increased grid demand often leads to higher utility rates over time.5
Manufacturer’s commitment to recycling water
TSMC and Intel’s semiconductor plants in Arizona address their substantial ultra-pure water needs for chip fabrication—primarily wafer rinsing and cooling—through advanced on-site recycling facilities designed for Arizona’s arid conditions. TSMC Arizona currently recycles about 65% of its water for cooling towers and scrubbers via in-house systems, with a new 15-acre Industrial Reclamation Water Plant (IRWP), groundbreaking in 2025 and operational by 2028, set to treat industrial wastewater back to ultrapure standards, targeting 85-90%+ recycling rates to achieve near-zero liquid discharge and minimize fresh municipal water draws. Intel, operating multiple Chandler fabs, already recycles over 80% of water through on-site reclamation plants like its 12-acre Ocotillo facility, purifying used water for reuse in manufacturing, cooling, or aquifer recharge, while pursuing net-positive water goals by 2030 via conservation and restoration. These strategies sharply reduce net consumption, with TSMC’s first fab projected to drop from 4.75 to 1 million gallons daily post-recycling, supporting sustainable expansion amid regional scarcity.6
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
February 2, 2026
Snowpack realities must be recognized by all seven Colorado River Basin states, says Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s chief negotiator
Becky Mitchell was particularly busy during the last week of January. On Wednesday, Jan. 28, she opened the annual Colorado Water Congress conference with a 1,100-word speech (the prepared remarks are below) that reiterated Colorado’s position in the stalemated Colorado River discussions.
Lower-basin states, said Mitchell, Colorado’s chief negotiator in Colorado River affairs, must fully come to terms with the changed realities on the Colorado River. “This means releases from Lake Powell must reflect actual inflows, not political pressure,” she said. “If reductions aren’t real, reservoirs won’t recover.”
The next day, Mitchell was in Washington D.C. along with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and the governors of five of the six other basin states. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who cited pre-existing family commitments, was the only governor absent.
The New York Times on Saturday reported that the governors achieved “no breakthrough — and whether they made progress was unclear.” Mitchell was quoted in that story saying upper basin states “cannot and will not impose mandatory reductions on our water rights holders to send water downstream.”
In other words, as she had said Colorado water users must live with the hydrologic realities, including this one of almost no snow. Colorado does not have the giant reservoirs of Powell and Mead upstream.
Others, including Eric Kuhn, the former general manager of the Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District, have urged a new model based on proportionate cutbacks, not absolute numbers. See: “Dancing With Deadpool on the Colorado River,” Big Pivots. Dec. 12, 2025.
That is how the four upper-basin states among themselves apportioned their share of the river flows in their 1948 compact. The 1922 compact used absolute numbers, i.e. 7.5 million acre-feet for each basin.
The Colorado River Compact of 1922 among the seven basin states uses some language that can be interpreted very differently about delivery obligations. That is a long, involved story — that may eventually be decided by the Supreme Court.
The Arizona Daily Star, however, reported a nuance of possible importance in statements made by Mitchell and Polis afterward. Mitchell emphasized “voluntary” conservation in the upper basin, while Polis said Colorado remained “committed to working collaboratively to find solutions that protect water for our state, while supporting the vitality of the Colorado River and everyone who depends on it.”
An Arizona source told the Daily Star’s Tony Davis that some Upper Basin governors appeared open to possible mandatory, as opposed to voluntary, conservation measures. “I think the other Upper Basin states expressed a willingness to put water on the table in a way that Colorado has not,” said the source, who asked for anonymity to protect continued participation in interstate river discussions.
But again, Colorado insists that it already has mandatory cutbacks — the ones imposed by Mother Nature. Using the prior appropriation doctrine to sort out priorities, Colorado restricts uses even in the more water-plentiful years. This year, the most “junior users” will most definitely not get water.
The black line in this chart represents snow-water equivalent in Colorado’s snowpack as of Feb. 1 relative to 1991-2020, a time frame of which about two-thirds consisted of drought and aridification. The map below shows the snow-water equivalent as of Jan. 31 by basin. More can be found at the Natural REsources Conservation Service.
Amy Ostdiek, the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s chief for interstate, federal, and water information, made that point in remarks at the Water Congress the day after Mitchell’s speech.
“These reductions in the upper basin are mandatory. They’re uncompensated. They’re the job of each state engineer’s office to go out and shut off water rights holders when that water isn’t available. And what that means in practice is that many years you have pre-compact water rights dating back to the 1800s getting shut off.”
The complications of mandatory reduction of water uses also came up in a session with state legislators at the Water Congress.
Ken Neubecker, a long-time Colorado River observer affiliated with environmental groups, said mandatory cuts to Colorado River water use would require an amendment to Colorado’s state constitution and likely those of other upper-basin states.
Colorado’s constitution has been amended repeatedly since 1876, when Colorado achieved statehood, but the provision setting forth prior appropriation has not been touched.
“I don’t think you will get an amendment that will give the state any kind of authority to enact mandatory cutbacks beyond existing administrative cutbacks,” said Neubecker. “That’s just not in the cards.”
The upper-basin states also differ fundamentally with lower-basin states in that the lower basin states have just a few giant diversions, such as the Central Arizona Project and the Imperial Valley. The headwaters states have thousands of legal diverters. That also makes application of mandatory diversions more difficult.
These facts would together make mandatory costs a legal and logistical nightmare to administer.
The states have a deadline imposed by the federal government, as operator of the dams, to agree how to share a shrinking river.
Later this year, Mother Nature may impose an even harsher deadline if current thin snowpack continues to prevail. The statewide snowpack was 58% of average as of late January when the Water Congress conference was getting underway.
One barometer, if imperfect, of the snowpack is the snowpack on Vail Mountain. On Jan. 15, the Vail Daily’s John LaConte reported that the Snotel measuring site at the ski area showed the worst snowpack reading in 44 years of measurements.
The opening of Vail’s Back Bowls also testifies to dryness of the Colorado River headwaters. As recently as 2012, a notoriously dry year, that south-facing ski terrain was not opened until Jan. 19, according to David Williams of the Vail Daily. On Jan. 26, he reported another foot of snow was necessary to open it.
In June 2023, Polis appointed Mitchellto her current position, as Colorado’s first full-time commissioner to the Upper Colorado River Commission. She had previously overseen the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
“Mitchell will now navigate the deep challenges of the Colorado River in this upgraded position, supported by an interdisciplinary team within the Department of Natural Resources and support from the Colorado Attorney General’s Office,” said the announcement.
“The next few years are going to be incredibly intense as we shift the way that the seven basin states cooperate and operate Lakes Powell and Mead,” Mitchell said in that 2023 announcement. “Climate change coupled with Lower Basin overuse have changed the dynamic on the Colorado River and we have no choice but to do things differently than we have before.”
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Click the link to read the article on the Summit Daily website (Ali Longwell). Here’s an excerpt:
January 27, 2026
As Colorado continues to negotiate with the seven Colorado River basin states on the post-2026 operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the state’s attorney general and lead negotiator are ready for a legal battle if the states continue to clash.
“If it comes to a fight, we will be ready,” said Becky Mitchell, the Colorado River commissioner, who represents the state on the Upper Colorado River Commission, at the Jan. 23 SMART Act hearing for the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, where the agency provided its annual update on priorities and programs to lawmakers.
After two years of back and forth, Colorado River basin states remain deadlocked, unable to agree on the guidelines for how Lake Powell and Lake Mead should operate beyond 2026. The operations of these two critical reservoirs have widespread implications for the approximately 40 million people, seven states, two counties and 30 tribal nations that rely on the river…In Colorado, the Colorado River and its tributaries provide water to around 60% of the state’s population.
“We developed priorities that continue to serve as my north star as we negotiate these post-2026 operational guidelines,” Mitchell said. “The most important of these priorities is to protect Colorado water users. This means that our already struggling water users and reservoirs cannot be used to solve the problem of overuse in the lower basin.”
[…]
Despite disagreements over how the reservoirs should operate in an uncertain future, reaching a consensus between the seven Colorado River basin states remains the objective for all involved, but time is ticking. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation — which manages Lake Powell and Lake Mead — has given the states until Feb. 14 to reach an agreement before the federal agency steps in and makes the decision itself. Mitchell told lawmakers that she was still “optimistic” about reaching a consensus by the deadline, adding that she will “sit in the room with the full intent to negotiate,” as long as there are “willing parties.”
“Folks should start worrying when I’m no longer in the room,” she said. “I will, 100%, be focused on a deal until there’s not a deal to be had.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
by Robert Marcos, photojournalist, Grand Junction Colorado
The Arizona Water Infrastructure Finance Authority (WIFA) has welcomed proposals from project teams on diverse strategies like ocean desalination, surface water importation, wastewater reclamation, and novel technologies to develop new renewable sources that bolster the state’s long-term water security amid growing shortages. The effort by WIFA come as the state faces additional cutbacks in its Colorado River supplies and its existing sources of groundwater are stressed to the limit.1
Concept 1: Reactivating the Yuma Desalting Plant
Persistent Colorado River shortages since the 2000s have prompted Arizona stakeholders, including the Central Arizona Project (CAP) and ADWR, to evaluate the Yuma Desalting Plant operation as a supply augmentation tool. Legislative proposals like Sen. Martha McSally’s 2020 bill sought to mandate repairs and restart, though dismissed as unfeasible due to $160-450 million in upgrades plus $25-40 million annual operations.2
As of 2025, the plant remains in “ready reserve” with ongoing evaluations of tech upgrades and alternatives like well-field pumping to protect the Ciénega de Santa Clara wetland in Mexico, which relies on untreated drainage flows. Environmental groups oppose reactivation, citing $670+ million costs for partial operation and habitat risks, while Bureau officials prioritize conservation over YDP use.3
Concept 2: Building a New Desal plant in Puerto Penasco
Arizona has shifted away from the original IDE Technologies proposal for a Sea of Cortez desalination plant near Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, which faced transparency issues and was not exclusively pursued. Instead, the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority advanced four alternative proposals in November 2025 for further feasibility analysis.4
One of those alternative proposals has a water exchange as a core mechanism: desalinated water output supplies Mexican users (e.g., local communities or agriculture), which would free an equivalent volume of Mexico’s Colorado River allocation for Arizona diversion northward via the Central Arizona Project canal to Phoenix and Tucson. This aligns with broader WIFA-approved initiatives from partners like EPCOR and Acciona-Fengate, which propose similar Gulf of California or Baja plants producing 150,000–500,000 acre-feet by 2031–2034 in “equal-for-equal” swaps, avoiding long-distance Arizona pipelines. Challenges include high costs ($3,000+ per acre-foot), U.S.-Mexico approvals, environmental compliance for brine discharge, and contract risks in surplus years, but it leverages proven global tech to onshore supplies without Upper Basin conflicts.5
Concept 3: Investing in a new desal plant in Southern California
Arizona has explored offering to invest state funds, through its water financing authority, in a large new seawater desalination plant on or near the Southern California coast, with the core idea that Arizona would help underwrite construction and then receive a contractual share of the plant’s output. In turn, that desalinated water would be used within California to free up an equivalent portion of California’s Colorado River allocation, which Arizona would then take upstream via the Colorado River and Central Arizona Project canal, effectively turning ocean water into an additional Colorado River supply for Arizona through an interstate exchange mechanism.6
If you’ve ever floated the Gunnison River in western Colorado through the Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area between Delta and Grand Junction, you’ve probably noticed that the land on either side of the stream alternates between public parcels and private ranch land. If the Bureau of Land Management has its way, some 4,000 acres of that private land will soon be entering the public domain, according to reporting from the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. That’s right, the agency is putting more lovely land into the public’s hands.
The parcels were formerly operated as a ranch by Dick Miller. After he died, the Conservation Fund purchased the land from Miller’s son for an undisclosed amount in order to sell it to the BLM. The associated BLM grazing leases will reportedly be transferred back to the BLM, but it isn’t clear whether they’ll be made available for grazing again.
The BLM is also looking to put a lot of public land into oil and gas companies’ hands. The agency is seeking public input on proposals to lease 74 parcels covering 33,530 acres in New Mexico, and 271 oil and gas parcels totaling 357,358 acres in Wyoming.
The New Mexico parcels are mostly in the Permian Basin, but do include tracts in the San Juan Basin located north and northeast of Chaco Culture National Historical Park (but not within the ten-mile buffer zone, which remains in place — for now).
The Wyoming parcels are concentrated in the southern part of the state between Rawlins and Green River, the central part of the state, and the Powder River Basin.
🦫 Wildlife Watch 🦅
Wolves in the West have had a rough go of it ever since white settlers showed up in the 1800s and proceeded to slaughter them en masse. And while they’ve been able to recover somewhat in the Northern Rockies, thanks in part to endangered species protections and reintroduction efforts, the move to bring them back to Colorado and the Southwest has hit obstacles — and tragedy, including:
Another reintroduced wolf has died in Colorado, reports the Colorado Sun’s Tracy Ross, bringing the total number of wolf fatalities since the start of reintroduction to 11. The cause of death has not been determined.
Meanwhile, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has paused new wolf reintroductions because it hasn’t been able to find another state or tribal nation to provide the animals.
Utah Department of Agriculture officials killed three wolves in the northern part of the state on Jan. 9. While wolves are protected by the Endangered Species Act in most of the state, they were delisted in one small section along the Wyoming border when protections were lifted for the Northern Rockies population. Now, apparently, the state will kill any wolves that wander into that area, just because they can, and to prevent them from going into the protected zone. That’s despite the fact that the three animals had not killed or stalked any livestock. “I have not heard any of my neighbors, and we haven’t had the experience ourselves that we’ve had actual issues with our cattle and wolves,” area livestock owner Launie Evans told KSL.
And in more sad news: “Taylor,” the Mexican gray wolf that wandered out of southern New Mexico and into the Mt. Taylor region, was found dead on I-40 near Grants. Taylor first roamed onto Mt. Taylor early last year, apparently not realizing that the feds don’t allow wolves to cross I-40. Wildlife officials captured him and deported him back to the southland, but he was persistent, and simply turned around and headed north again. He was removed again in November, but couldn’t stay away from Mt. Taylor. This time, on his return journey, he was struck by a vehicle.
“Taylor’s death is a heartbreaking reminder that highways like I-40 are not just lines on a map, they are lethal barriers for wildlife,” said Claire Musser, executive director of the Grand Canyon Wolf Recovery Project, in a statement. “Abolishing I-40 as a management boundary is long overdue. If we are serious about recovery, we must allow wolves to move freely across suitable habitats and invest in wildlife crossings and landscape-scale connectivity so highways no longer function as death traps.”
And, finally, CPW’s latest map of wolf activity is out (at the top of this section), and it shows that wolves have been wandering into new parts of the state. Folks in the Silverton area might just be seeing some soon. If you think you see one, but aren’t sure if it’s a wolf or coyote, this little guide from CPW might help:
Public Citizen just released an accounting of some of the ways the Trump administration is subsidizing global mining corporations and their operations on public lands — and the ways in which executives made off like bandits as a result. It’s worth reading the whole report, but here are just a small sampling of highlights:
$8.8 million: Amount 13 mining corporations, including Rio Tinto, Resolution Copper, South32, Lithium Americas, and Ambler Metals, spent on lobbying in 2025.
$3.5 million: Amount Lithium America paid Interior Department official Karen Budd-Falen’s husband for water rights for its Thacker Pass mine in Nevada. The federal government also took a 5% stake in the company and the mine as a condition of preserving a Biden-era loan.
$400 million: Amount the U.S. Defense Department paid for a stake in Las Vegas-based MP Materials, which owns the Mountain Pass rare earths mine in California. The Pentagon also loaned the company $150 million.
The Bureau of Land Management approved the Grassy Mountain gold and silver mine on 469 acres of public land in Malheur County, Oregon. The action allows Paramount Gold Nevada to develop an underground mine, an onsite mill, and “associated storage” (which I’m taking to mean they’ll be able to dispose of toxic mill tailings on public land mining claims).
📖 Reading (and watching) Room 🧐
Here’s a great piece by Leah Sottile, who has written authoritatively on right-wing movements and more, on the plague of hypocrisy going around right now.
The Border Chronicle is indispensable reading these days and, well, always. This piece, titled Border Patrol Nation, is an important look at the violent history of the Border Patrol.
Speaking of hypocrisy: I’m sure most of you have heard Trump administration officials saying that federal ICE and/or CPB agents shot Alex Pretti because he brought a gun to a protest. The photos below were all captured at the May 2014 Recapture rally in Blanding, Utah. Quite a few of the attendees — who were on hand to protest “federal overreach” — were armed. None of them were shot. Just sayin’.
Folks exercising the right to bear arms at Recapture Canyon to protest federal overreach. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson
Silverton, Colorado is pictured in this William Henry Jackson photograph dated between 1876 and 1880. (Courtesy of Denver Public Library Digital Collections, X-1717)
In the years leading up to Colorado statehood, nearly all of the territory’s western half still belonged to the Ute people, who had inhabited the northern Colorado Plateau for centuries.
An 1868 treaty between the U.S. government and six bands of the Ute tribe reserved nearly all of the western half of the Colorado Territory for their “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation,” and stated that “no persons … shall ever be permitted to pass over, settle upon, or reside in the territory described.”
The agreement lasted just four years.
Ouray and subchiefs, 1873. Ute Indians and agents in Washington, DC after conclusion of the 1873 Brunot Agreement. Front row, left to right: Guero, Chipeta, Ouray, and Piah; second row: Uriah M. Curtis, James B. Thompson, Charles Adams, and Otto Mears; back row: Washington, Susan (Ouray’s sister), Johnson, Jack, and John. Photo credit: Colorado Encyclopedia
By 1872 prospectors for gold and silver in the San Juan Mountains were routinely trespassing on Ute lands, and the following year the federal government — under pressure from territorial leaders demanding access to the region’s “large bodies of mineral and agricultural resources” — pushed the Utes to cede a 3.7-million-acre area surrounding the San Juans in what was known as the Brunot Agreement.
So began the Colorado Territory’s next major mining boom, and the first to be concerned principally with silver — the extraction and minting of which would dominate the soon-to-be state’s economy and politics for the next several decades.
By 1876, fortune seekers could reach the San Juans by taking the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad to Cañon City, and from there traveling on grueling mountain toll roads to mining settlements like Ouray, Silverton and Lake City. In late January 1876, the Silver World of Lake City advised that despite “the unusual quantity of snow,” the wagon road that passed through Saguache was manageable with sleighs, but the more southerly route through Del Norte was “almost impassable.”
(Courtesy of the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection, Colorado State Library)
The silver rush had helped revive the fortunes of southern Colorado, turning towns like Pueblo and Cañon City, where residents had long felt ignored by the territory’s northern establishment, into important transportation and commercial hubs serving the remote San Juan mining district.
Other Front Range towns, including Colorado Springs, regretted “the outflow of men consequent upon the San Juan and other mining excitements.” A gold rush to the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory was also underway at the time — another treaty-breaking incursion into Native American lands, which would soon lead to a war with the Lakota people and the Battle of Little Bighorn later in 1876.
The San Juan mines, wrote the Silver World, required “earnest, energetic men … who can submit to the deprivation of the luxuries of a higher civilization.” The paper’s weekly editions from the winter of 1876 contained few reports of serious crime, though the threat of “snowslides,” frostbite and mountain lions were often mentioned.
But by then the region’s boomtowns were beginning to evolve from rough-and-ready mining camps into something more established — incorporating municipal governments, forming school districts and issuing bonds for the construction of new wagon roads and other public improvements. Ordinances approved by Lake City’s new board of trustees included a schedule of fines levied for misdemeanors, published in the Silver World on Jan. 15.
“Read the ordinances which appear in this issue,” the paper’s editors advised, “and save yourself the possibility of being fined or getting in the ‘jug.’”
Public intoxication or animal cruelty could cost an offender up to $50, while the penalty for impersonating a police officer or “immoderately” riding or driving horses on town streets could run up to $100. To “quarrel in a boisterous manner” was considered a breach of the peace and carried a fine of between $5 and $25.
Arriving in Denver for the meeting of the territorial Legislature in January, Rep. Reuben J. McNutt of Silverton had brought a petition from his fellow settlers for the creation of a new county encompassing the western San Juan boomtowns. The Legislature soon passed House Bill No. 1, and Gov. John Routt signed it into law on Jan. 31, officially creating the new San Juan County, from which the present-day counties of Ouray, San Miguel and Dolores would later be carved out.
Alongside these administrative necessities, some inhabitants of the remote mining towns aimed for the cultural betterment of settlements like Lake City, where the Silver World reported billiards were still the “principal amusement.” The Lake City Dramatic Club staged its first theater production on Feb. 2, 1876, performing George Melville Baker’s “Among the Breakers,” and the cast of amateurs won a rave review from the local paper.
“The universal testimony of all who witnessed it was that it would have been difficult for professionals to have surpassed it,” declared the Silver World. “The play was in all respect (was) well mounted and in no instance were there any of those hitches so common in entertainments of this nature, and which tend alike to embarrass the performers and distract the attention of the audience.”
The gradual dispossession of Ute lands in western Colorado would not end with the Brunot Agreement and the rush to the San Juans. The so-called northern or White River Utes were expelled from Colorado beginning in 1880, and today reside on the Uinta and Ouray Indian Reservation in Utah. Three other bands of the tribe grouped together as the southern Utes — the Capote, Mouache, and Weenuche — agreed in 1878 to cede all but a small portion of their lands in far southwest Colorado along the New Mexico border.
The southern Utes later split into the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, consisting of the Capote and Mouache bands, and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, made up of the Weenuche band. Today, the Southern Ute and the Ute Mountain Ute are the only two federally-recognized tribes within Colorado’s borders.
Sunset from the western shore of Antelope Island State Park, Great Salt Lake, Utah, United States.. Sunset viewed from White Rock Bay, on the western shore of Antelope Island. Carrington Island is visible in the distance. By Ccmdav – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2032320
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox has proposed a plan to fill the Great Salt Lake by 2034, aiming to restore the lake that currently supports approximately 7,000 jobs…
Brian Steed, the Great Salt Lake Commissioner, highlighted efforts to conserve water among local residents and the agricultural community. “I think we have a lot of work to do to get there obviously we all work for the governor and I’m really happy to set that as our metric and we’re going to strive really hard to make that goal,” said Steed. He noted that the goal is not just about filling the lake but also about encouraging sustainable water use practices in the surrounding communities.
Steed indicated that strategic plans have been in place for years to identify areas where water can be shared with the Great Salt Lake. This includes working with local agriculture to promote efficient water usage that benefits both farmers and lake levels.
Colorado statewide annual temperature anomaly (°F) with respect to the 1901-2000 average. Graphic credit: Colorado Climate Center
By Kiley Bense, Bob Berwyn, Keerti Gopal, Lee Hedgepeth, Lisa Sorg
January 26, 2026
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Climate change is making disasters more intense and unpredictable. FEMA is less prepared than it was a year ago.
A sprawling winter storm that left hundreds of thousands without power, grounded thousands of flights and disrupted travel across the eastern half of the U.S. could be the first real test of the second Trump administration’s Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The president has said that he wants to eliminate FEMA, and the agency has lost thousands of employees since his second term began. Emergency-management experts have braced for the moment that a weakened FEMA would face a multi-state disaster.
“We’ve been lucky, really, over the last year,” said Alan Gerard, a retired National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologist who now writes the newsletter Balanced Weather. “We didn’t have any landfalling hurricanes. We haven’t really had a wide-ranging natural disaster-type situation in the last several months.”
FEMA typically plays a key role in coordinating and delivering resources when an emergency hits multiple states at once. “FEMA and the whole federal infrastructure is really critical in terms of organizing big responses like this,” said Mathy Stanislaus, a former assistant administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Land & Emergency Management.
President Donald Trump has so far approved federal disaster declarations for 12 states, mostly in the South, in the wake of the storm.
The Trump administration’s cuts to FEMA come at the same time that climate change is making large-scale weather disasters more likely and more intense, even as the president continues to question the basics of climate science. On Friday, Trump posted on social media about the storm and cold snap, asking followers, “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???”
In fact, scientists say, global warming has reshaped the atmospheric engine in ways that can make winter storms and extreme cold outbreaks more disruptive than ever.
Rapid Arctic warming and melting, stronger and more intense ocean heat waves, increased atmospheric moisture and more frequent disruptions of the stratospheric polar vortex are all factors “contributing to the extreme winter weather unfolding across the U.S. this week,” Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist and senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, said via email.
More than a foot of snow fell across the U.S. from Arkansas to Massachusetts, with some places seeing nearly two feet. Ice blanketed much of the South, bringing down tree limbs and knocking out power from Texas to North Carolina.
At least 20 people were killed during the storm, and thousands are navigating power loss, dangerous travel conditions and freezing temperatures. More than 600,000 homes and businesses were without power as of Monday afternoon.
Emergency management experts and government officials warned that the situation is still unfolding, particularly in Southern states impacted by ice. Falls, traffic accidents, hypothermia and carbon monoxide poisoning are among the possible threats in the storm’s aftermath.
“The danger period is much higher immediately after the storm passes,” said Craig Fugate, a former FEMA administrator.
How Climate Change Reshapes Winter
Scientists agree that human-caused warming has changed the way air and energy move around the planet in complex and interrelated ways that influence outbreaks of extreme winter weather.
The current cold wave is not happening in isolation, but in a fundamentally altered climate system. At a basic level, the oceans are warmer and the atmosphere holds more moisture than 50 or 100 years ago. Both fuel stronger storms, including nor’easters, which have intensified significantly in recent decades, according to a 2024 study.
Nor’easters spin up along the East Coast, drag subtropical moisture from the south and pull frigid polar air from the north. Both their maximum wind speeds and hourly precipitation rates have increased since 1940, said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, a co-author of the paper.
That research, he said via email, for the first time was able to quantify the changes. He warned that “more intense storms, with greater amounts of snowfall” are to be expected, even as the planet warms.
“Stronger storms, as they spin, pull up more warm air on one side and pull more cold air down on the other side, so we see both warm and cold temperature extremes associated with them,” he said.
Along with warmer oceans and a wetter atmosphere, global warming has also reduced Arctic sea ice by nearly a third since the 1980s, which is enough to change the path of the jet stream, the wavy, fast-moving river of air that separates cold Arctic air from warmer air to the south.
Extreme cold events are usually linked to big north-south bends in that flow, said Francis, the Woodwell Climate Research Center scientist, who is known for her research on rapid Arctic warming and its influence on mid-latitude weather patterns.
Right now, the jet stream is bulging far north over the western U.S. while plunging deep south over the east, allowing Arctic air to spill unusually far south. The pattern is becoming more common as the Arctic warms faster than the rest of the planet, weakening the temperature contrast that normally keeps the jet stream straighter and faster.
“Big waves like this are more common when the Arctic is unusually warm, and it’s near record-warm right now,” she said. The pattern has been common this winter and likely is linked with a strong and persistent ocean heat wave in the North Pacific, she added.
An ocean heat wave in that area bulges the jet stream north over the West, causing a southward dip downstream, over the central and Eastern U.S., followed by another northward bulge that brought extreme warmth to Greenland.
Adding complexity is the fact that Arctic warming is uneven, said atmospheric scientist Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research and a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Parsons Laboratory. He’s known for his work on how Arctic variability influences winter weather and the polar vortex, a pool of frigid air usually locked high over the Arctic.
Especially intense heating north of Scandinavia ripples the atmosphere in a way that disrupts the polar vortex. When the ripples caused by uneven warming turn into larger waves, they reach the high-altitude polar vortex and distend it, like a soft water balloon.
In that stretched position, Cohen said, the polar vortex pulls extremely cold air from Siberia across the Arctic and into the central and eastern U.S. Because the air travels quickly, it has little time to warm, increasing the likelihood of severe and long-lasting cold outbreaks.
Meanwhile, some areas of the U.S. that rely on snow are increasingly out of luck. While the East shivers, much of the West has been gripped by warm and dry conditions for weeks, with winter snowpack—critical for summer stream flows—near record low in many areas.
A Deep Freeze in the Deep South
Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee were among the states hardest hit during the storm, with more than half a million customers still without power as of Monday morning. Utility companies in Tennessee described “catastrophic damage,” and in Mississippi, one company warned it could be weeks before power was fully restored.
That grim news comes as the region faces extremely low temperatures tonight. These conditions could be dire for some people if they are trapped without power in their homes for an extended period of time.
In Louisiana, at least two people died due to hypothermia in Caddo Parish, according to the state’s Department of Health. The Tennessee Emergency Management Agency confirmed three deaths related to weather conditions in Crockett, Haywood and Obion counties near Memphis.
The mayor of Oxford, Mississippi, Robyn Tannehill, said in an interview with meteorologist Matt Laubhan that the damage in her town was “extensive.”
“It looks like there’s been a tornado on every street in Oxford,” she said. “Trees on houses, trees on cars, trees blocking roadways, trees that have pulled whole power lines down and power poles that have snapped. It is an emergency situation right now.”
Fangs of ice hung from trees and power lines in Tennessee, where Gov. Bill Lee told residents in an online briefing Sunday that the storm was “unusually dangerous in many ways.”
Freezing rain, strong winds and temperatures in the lower single digits “can hamper our ability to respond” amid widespread power outages, said Patrick Sheehan, director of the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency.
“It looks like there’s been a tornado on every street.”— Robyn Tannehill, mayor of Oxford, Mississippi
Residents in Adamsville, Tennessee, located near the Mississippi border, lost access to running water and won’t get it back until power is restored.
In North Carolina, some of the worst impacts of the storm occurred in the western mountains, which are still recovering from damage Hurricane Helene inflicted in September 2024.
“We are concerned about the double-whammy impact,” Gov. Josh Stein said during an online briefing Saturday. “Any future trees falling will add more fuel on the ground once we get into wildfire season.”
In Mississippi, Gov. Tate Reeves said on Sunday that the situation in the state would get worse before it got better as ice on trees and power lines continued to cause power outages in gusting winds.Reeves said the state was coordinating with FEMA to bring in additional generators and supplies for warming centers, such as cots, water and blankets.
Some people may have difficulty getting to those warming centers. Road travel continues to be impacted across the South, where temperatures are expected to remain at or below freezing throughout Monday.
“As the governor said, we can sum up our road conditions and road travel with one word, and that is, ‘nope,’” said Brad White, the executive director of the Mississippi Department of Transportation. “We would love to see y’all but not zigzagging across three lanes of traffic at 40 miles per hour.”
In Alabama, 27-year-old Morgan Lakesha Hawkins of Birmingham was killed and another person was seriously injured after their vehicle struck a guardrail in nearby Mountain Brook.
The danger for people in the South is not over, especially for those without power. “An extremely cold night is forecast tonight with low temperatures in the single digits,” said Gerard, the meteorologist. “This level of cold is highly unusual, and buildings are not generally built for [it]. The danger of hypothermia and infrastructure damage to things like water pipes and mains is significant.”
“Torturous” Cold in Chicago
The Arctic air brought Chicago its lowest recorded wind chill since 2019, at 36 degrees below zero on Friday, according to the National Weather Service’s local office. Chicago Public Schools closed that day, with the city on an extreme cold watch then and throughout the weekend. NWS warned that just 10 minutes outside could result in frostbite on exposed skin.
Extreme cold poses other serious health hazards, including hypothermia and the exacerbation of chronic conditions. From Thursday through Monday afternoon, 339 patients were seen for cold-exposure injuries at Chicago emergency departments, according to the city’s Department of Public Health.
The number on Saturday alone, 119, was almost four times more than the city expected. Nearly half of the patients were Black, which speaks to the unequal impact of weather hazards.
Cold-related health hazards are most acute for the elderly and those without access to consistent shelter. Rev. Shawna Bowman, executive director of Friendship Community Place, a neighborhood hub in Jefferson Park on the city’s Northwest Side, coordinated with volunteers to keep the space open as a warming center over the weekend and helped unhoused residents find safe places to spend the night.
Bowman said it can be challenging for residents to know what resources are available and to travel to warming centers not in their neighborhood. The Northwest Side has “a real dearth of resources,” they added, and mutual-aid efforts like theirs are working to fill in the gaps.
Early Saturday evening, the community-run center had a handful of visitors, some eating instant ramen to warm up from the cold.
Ivon Ivans sat on a sofa near the entrance, preparing to go to a nearby church with her boyfriend, Miguel Martinez, for the night. Ivans has been homeless for three years and is on the waitlist for housing through the Chicago Housing Authority, she said. Martinez said he has been unhoused for about 20 years.
Ivans said she has several chronic health conditions that are exacerbated by the cold, including cirrhosis of the liver and anemia. Martinez has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease that flares up in the winter, making it harder for him to breathe.
“It’s torturous,” Ivans said of the weather.
Across the street from the community center, five people were taking refuge for the night at a police station—all of which are open 24 hours for shelter from the cold.
Yvette Hausman and her fiancé, Nathan Watkins, who are both unhoused, sat on the floor of the station with blankets and some belongings. Hausman said she didn’t know the cold was coming, but that she was grateful for community members who mobilized quickly to provide and spread the word about impromptu warming resources.
“There has been a lot of warming centers that have popped up randomly,” Hausman said. “You just see the community come together.”
“The First Boots on the Ground”
It’s not yet clear how turmoil at FEMA under the Trump administration could be impacting response and recovery for the storm, but experts are concerned that delays in the allocation of funding, leadership upheaval and staffing cuts mean that the agency’s ability to function effectively during and after an emergency has been seriously constrained. FEMA did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
“Certainly the dysfunction at FEMA over the past year is affecting any response that happens across the country,” said Samantha Montano, an associate professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy and the author of the book “Disasterology: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis.”
The Trump administration laid off or forced out more than 2,000 FEMA employees in 2025 and had planned to end the contracts for thousands more this year until Thursday, when the agency paused that effort amid preparation for the winter storm. More than 300 CORE, or Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery Employees, had already been let go by that point.
CORE workers are critical at FEMA, said Michael Coen, a former chief of staff at the agency. “These employees are usually the first boots on the ground,” he said.
The agency has struggled with leadership turnover and the departure of experienced senior staff; FEMA has cycled through three directors in the past year. The agency’s current leader, Karen Evans, lacks relevant experience, Coen said.
Montano said rural parts of the country affected by a storm like this one typically need federal help more than urban areas. In places with smaller emergency management departments and fewer resources, “that extra support from the federal government is even more important,” she said.
Coen said he thought FEMA had done well so far coordinating with the states affected by the storm. “Hopefully the current Trump administration saw value in how FEMA coordinated and convened a meeting with 21 governors to talk about a national effort to ensure preparedness and how they would all respond together,” he said. Coen praised career staff at FEMA who have handled the response.
But he’s worried about future disasters. The effects of climate change mean that the next large-scale weather event may not be far behind this one. The agency has not said whether it will resume contract non-renewals after this storm has passed.
“FEMA is supposed to be ready for no-notice events. The current political leadership isn’t taking that into account, and they just react to storms as they happen,” Coen said. “For someone like me who has had a career in emergency management, that’s very troubling.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Click the link to read the article on the Tucson.com website (Tony Davis). Here’s an excerpt:
January 31, 2026
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs and leaders of the six other Western states that rely on the Colorado River ended a Friday meeting in Washington, D.C. with no deal to end a stalemate over rights to the river’s dwindling water supply. Hobbs indicated that progress was made thanks to newfound flexibility from upstream states over their willingness to make commitments to cut some of their river water use, as the Lower Basin states, including Arizona, have already done. But Colorado officials all but directly contradicted Hobbs’ comments, saying they and Upper Colorado River Basin states were sticking to their position opposing any mandatory water use cuts on their part. The meeting was hosted by U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum…
“I was encouraged to hear Upper Basin governors express a willingness to turn water conservation programs into firm commitments of water savings,” [Katie] Hobbs posted on social media after the two-hour meeting. “Arizona has been and will continue to be at the table offering solutions to the long-term protection of the river so long as every state recognizes our shared responsibility…
Mitchell said, “Colorado is committed to being part of the solution, and with our Upper Basin partners, we have offered every tool available to us. This includes making releases from our upstream reservoirs and establishing a contribution program as part of a consensus agreement. However, any contributions must be voluntary, and we have real ideas and plans to achieve the goals…”As several upper basin governors clearly stated at the meeting, we cannot and will not impose mandatory reductions on our water rights holders to send water downstream,” she wrote. “Our water users are already facing uncompensated reductions through state regulation. In many cases, these reductions impact 1880s water rights that predate the (Colorado River) Compact. Any contribution program must recognize our hydrologic realities: we simply cannot conserve water that we do not get to begin with.”
[…]
Mitchell spoke in even stronger terms earlier in the week at a public talk she gave in Aurora, a suburb of Denver. She spoke at the annual meeting of the Colorado Water Conference, a professional association that advocates for policies and laws that protect the state’s waters.
“For more than a century, we built a system on optimism and entitlement. We planned for abundance, labeled it normal, wrote it in the law, and when the water showed up, we spent it,” Mitchell told the gathering, in remarks reported by the Colorado Sun news website. “When it didn’t, we blamed the weather, climate change or each other. Anything but the simple math.”
The seven states need to tie reservoir releases more closely to the actual amount of water coming in, Mitchell said in an interview after the speech. That was a nonnegotiable for the Friday meeting, she said. Overuse by the Lower Basin is draining the system, Colorado officials say.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
Welcome to the Landline, a monthly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States. Sign up to get it in your inbox. Screenshot from the High Country News website.
The latest iteration of the Information Age appears to have arrived in full-force, manifested as AI, the digital cloud, remote work and the mass migration from the material world into cyberspace.
A couple of decades ago, when I was feeling optimistic, I envisioned this future as a Jetsons-esque world, where the noisy clang of machinery would give way to a soft electrified hum while robots and artificial intelligence performed menial and mundane tasks, freeing us to live like George Jetson, working a leisurely nine hours a week as a digital index operator at a space sprocket firm.
This new era would be a vast improvement over the worn-out Industrial Age, mainly because it would come with an energy transition. We would ditch our clanky old machinery — all the smokestacks and pollution and internal combustion engines — trading them for sleek cars that, if not flying, would at least be electric, powered by cleaner, gentler and quieter forms of energy, like wind and solar.
Data center construction at 49th & Race, Denver. Photo credit: Allen Best
But now, the future is here and AI is everywhere, whether you want it to be or not. It can’t yet wash the dishes, and even though it’s begun taking people’s jobs, it hasn’t erased the need to work for a living. It can, however, correct your spelling errors, help researchers crunch huge datasets, diagnose illnesses and even provide what passes for mental health counseling. It can also inject language you never intended into your messages without your knowledge, churn out inane emails and stilted high school essays, and casually plagiarize artists, writers and journalists.
This new age has its marvelous aspects, I suppose, but it is also disappointing — even baffling. It’s true that it has coincided with the clean(er) energy transition; coal-burning for power generation has been declining since 2007, while solar, wind and battery storage have boomed. And yet instead of allowing us to abandon the most outdated component of the Industrial Age — the production of power via fossil fuel combustion — the Information Age has helped perpetuate this dirty habit. Our most futuristic, newfangled technologies continue to rely on prehistoric energy.
Every AI query or other cyber-operation that relies on cloud computing is processed by data centers, warehouse-like buildings housing row after row of servers that churn through digital information. Each individual operation might use a fairly small amount of power, but a single data center handling millions of queries per day can guzzle as much electricity as an entire city.
And now, the buildup of energy-intensive, AI-processing hyperscale data centers threatens to outpace the energy transition, while giving fossil fuel-boosters justification for continuing to rely on dirty energy sources. To meet the burgeoning demand for power, utilities are nixing plans to shutter old coal and nuclear plants, and data center developers are even constructing new natural gas generators to power their facilities.
Each time you or I queue up an old Jetsons episode on YouTube or ask ChatGPT whether a video was real or fabricated by Grok, the request travels at roughly the speed of light to a data center. Perhaps that data center happens to be a grid-connected facility in, say, the Phoenix metro area, where hyperscale data centers are sprouting like cheatgrass. The facility’s GPUs and CPUs run off electricity funneled in from transmission lines that connect to power plants spread across the utility’s entire grid.
That means there’s a good chance that some of that power is coming from the Four Corners coal power plant in northwestern New Mexico, or from natural gas plants burning methane from the oil and gas fields in the nearby San Juan Basin.
How did all that coal and methane get there in the first place? We have to go back some 145 million years to the beginning of the Cretaceous period, when a shallow, briny sea covered much of what is now the Interior West. Over thousands of millennia, the sea advanced and retreated numerous times, laying down layers of sediment — sand, mud, clay — each time, supplemented by silt carried by huge rivers originating in adjacent mountain ranges.
An artist’s reconstruction of a ‘Sarabosaurus dahli’ swimming with ammonites and fish in southern Utah 94 million years ago. Andrey Atuchin/Bureau of Land Management
Embedded within the sediment was organic material, including plants, algae, bacteria, plankton and other microorganisms — along with much larger creatures, from Cretalamna (a megatooth shark) to the Sarabosaurus dahli, which might have resembled some combination of fish, seal and lizard. As the sediment piled up and was subjected to heat and pressure, each layer was transformed into a rock formation: the Dakota sandstone, the Mancos shale, the Mesa Verde sandstone and more. Meanwhile, the organisms decomposed in an oxygen-free environment, eventually transforming into crude oil and methane, or natural gas.
In the Late Cretaceous, before the dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago, the sea retreated for the final time, leaving behind vast freshwater swamps in what is now the San Juan Basin. The climate back then was downright sultry — rainy and warm and almost tropical. Trees and plants grew profusely in and around the shallow marshes, and fallen leaves and toppled trees decayed rapidly, leaving behind deep accumulations of decayed vegetal matter, or peat. Ultimately, this, too, would be transformed by pressure, heat and millions of years into thick, methane-infused coalbeds that are now part of the Fruitland formation.
Coal Mine Canyon is lined with reddish sandstones and siltstones of Mesozoic age. The Canyon is situated in a remote locale bordering the eastern edge of the Painted Desert. On the mesa above the canyon, are longitudinal sands dunes. The quality of coal in the canyon is poor and active coal mining was discontinued decades ago. Photo credit: Ted Grussing/University of Arizona
These days, huge draglines with house-sized shovels tear into the earth at the Navajo Mine, exhuming the remnants of those swamps at a rate of about 14,000 tons daily. The carboniferous rocks are then shipped a few miles north to the Four Corners power plant. In the nearby gas fields, drillers have poked tens of thousands of holes in the ground and hydraulically fractured the rock formations to get at the hydrocarbons, the physical memories of ancient sea creatures, which are then processed and piped to natural gas power plants.
The fuels are burned, releasing carbon and other pollutants that have been stored for millions of years underground, to generate enough steam to turn turbines to spark an electromagnetic field and send electrons across the desert in massive transmission lines to the Arizona grid. From there, they travel to the data center’s server banks, businesses and homes, ultimately ending up in the outlet next to your bed where you charge your phone.
Fossil fuel combustion made the Industrial Age possible and continues to drive much of society, both in and out of cyberspace. Yet when you factor in the immense amounts of time, human labor, energy and downright violence required to extract and process and transport these fuels, the whole endeavor seems increasingly bizarre. The strangeness is only magnified by the fact that this ancient form of energy powers the newfangled technology of the Information Age, especially when the same technology has given us access to an abundance of renewable, cleaner forms of power.
