Click here to read the assessment. Here’s an excerpt:

Highlights:

A wetter-than-normal April and early May led to a bumpy snowpack trajectory through the peak(s) and into the main melt season, and as of May 11, SWE is above normal in all areas except northwestern Colorado, southeastern Wyoming, and southern Utah. The highest, wettest Snotel sites in the region appear to have just peaked, among them Grand Targhee (WY) and Snowbird (UT), both at about 60″ of SWE, well above normal.

With very large snowpacks and the melt well underway, daily streamflows in northern Utah and western Wyoming rivers are at high (>90th percentile) or record-high values, with yet higher flows and flooding potential on tap with upcoming warm, sunny weather. An elevated risk of flooding in these basins, as well as in the Arkansas basin in Colorado, will persist for several weeks.

The May 1 NRCS spring-summer runoff forecasts changed only slightly from the April 1 forecasts at most points. The regional picture is still tipped towards above-average runoff, though with a clear gradient between the much-above-average (>130%) volumes expected in northern and central Utah and most of Wyoming, and the more variable but closer-to-average volumes elsewhere. Forecasted Lake Powell April-July inflows have slipped again, to 123% of average per NRCS, and 120% of average per NOAA CBRFC.

April saw mostly above-normal precipitation for the region, with central and western Wyoming, far northern Utah, and southeastern Colorado coming out very wet, while central and southern Utah and western Colorado were on the dry side. Statewide, Wyoming yet again was the winner, in the 93rd percentile for precipitation, with Colorado in the 72nd percentile, and Utah in the 53rd percentile.

Drought conditions have markedly improved since early April, so that the region now has less drought coverage than at any time since August 2009. There was reduction of drought in southeastern Colorado and northeastern Wyoming, though some degradation to D0 in southeastern Utah. D1 or D2 conditions now cover only 2% of Colorado (down from 22%), 0.1% of Wyoming (down from 9%), and 0% of Utah.

The tropical Pacific remains on the warm side of ENSO-neutral conditions, though with some cooling in the last few weeks. The ENSO forecast models call for neutral conditions to continue, but with the chances of transition to El Niño conditions rising to ~50% by late summer and fall.

From The Mountain Town News (Allen Best):

It’s edge season in the Rocky Mountains. It can rain or snow on any given day in May. But on the first Friday, when we drove from Denver west on I-70 to Edwards for a business meeting, the Continental Divide sparkled with sunshine dancing off the residual snow of winter. Everywhere it looked like I feel after a good night’s sleep, stretching my way into a new day.

How very different it was in the spring of 1983. I was working in Winter Park that year and living in Granby. Mid-winter had been relatively mild. Then, after the lifts closed in April, the snow came on in earnest. Andy Miller, until recently a reporter for our newspaper, the Winter Park Manifest, had gone to the Arctic Circle with explorer Will Steger. Returning to Fraser late in the month, he reported that he had seen more sunshine in the Arctic than we had seen in the Fraser Valley.

I recall little melting of snow until the second week of June. Then, there were ponds everywhere. A majority of the water in the Colorado River lies in these mountain headwaters, mostly in Colorado, at an elevation of 9,000 to 11,000 feet, or roughly the same band as where ski areas are found.

At Kremmling, where it picks up the Blue, the Colorado River spread widely before thrashing its way down Gore Canyon, which drops more than 300 feet in three miles, the steepest drop of the river’s 1,450-mile journey from Rocky Mountain National Park to its final denouement near Yuma, Arizona, according to a U.S. Geological Survey document I read decades ago. The amount of snow and then runoff took water managers by surprise. The surge of water that summer nearly took out Glen Canyon Dam, just upstream from the Grand Canyon.

This is a very different year. After heavy snows in early winter, March and April were exceptionally mild, even hot. The evidence of heat was all around. The aspen forests on the hillsides above Eagle-Vail, where I used to live, were nearly all leafed out, weeks earlier than I remember. The color of an aspen grove putting on its clothes for summer is sublime. That shade of green upon first leafing is hesitant and delicate, tiptoeing instead of striding, flirtatious rather than a full-on hug. It’s infatuation instead of commitment. In this edge season, aspen groves are the innocence of first love.

We had allocated the afternoon to wandering, but were caught up for awhile in our indecisiveness. We had good cause, including nostalgia, to go in several directions of our earlier lives. “You make a decision,” I told Cathy, but she couldn’t, any more than I could. This indecisiveness can momentarily be maddening, but it’s part of the process, part of the journey. If you know where you’re going, you will only go to where you know. Luckily for me, and perhaps for her, too, Cathy and I dance well when in our vagabond mood. In this way of rambling, unsure of where we want to go, we end up where we want to be.

That proved to be the case on this trip. We drove north with Steamboat vaguely in mind. At McCoy, whimsy led me to leave the paved highway for the graveled River Road. Stopping near Burns, where the great river is joined by Catamount Creek, we watched two stand-up paddleboarders navigate down the river. At the BLM put-in, two guys were drinking beer at the picnic table, remarking upon the providence of agreeable weather. Three young guys drove up and scrambled down the bridge’s rock rip-rap with their fishing poles.

Dropping mydrawers to change from the khaki dress pants of my business meeting into more comfortableblue jeans, I had a sense of being watched. A critter—I think a marmot—was watching me warily from the protection of a plastic discharge tube about 10 feet away. I studied the northern edge of the river, lined by yellow sedges from last year’s growing season and, just a little higher, the red of willows. This is what I had come to see: the mighty Colorado River, not so far from its origins.

Returning to the highway, we followed the route of the explorer John Charles Fremont on one of his four expeditions to the west, topping over a divide to see the broad expanse of Egeria Park.

Egeria Park is a hard place to make a living, hard to get out of your mind once you’ve been bitten. The Yampa River originates here, sandwiched by the Gore Range on the east and the Flat Tops on the west. It’s a place of big ranches, broad meadows, and white-faced cows. From Toponas, I drove a graveled county road through this pastoral heaven, wisps of remnant snow soon appearing along Egeria Creek. I had been on this road once before, 26 years ago, but I wasn’t sure where it would take us. We continued past a few ranch headquarters and then, far up the valley, now getting close to the forested flanks of the Flat Tops, the road veered southwest.

“Shouldn’t we be turning around?” Cathy asked. “It’s 6 o’clock.”

“Just a bit further,” I said, now on a mission.

We stopped just shortof a snowbank lingering in the road. Rounded drifts observed the north-facing hillsides. Leaving the car and the road, we picked our way through the gradual slope below the snowbank. The grasses of last year, now brown, were matted down, but between the stalks were glimmers of yellow, marsh marigolds. This is where I had wanted to go, the edge I wanted to see and hear, mountain snow becoming water. I wanted to smell the air at this edge, feel the wet on my feet, maybe even dip my tongue to taste this spring runoff, this edge between winter and summer.

This and a million other places like it are where the river starts, the massive thing we call the Colorado River. Here the land is merely wet underfoot, but below it becomes a rivulet, and then a stream and, below us, Egeria Creek. Egeria Creek flows into the Yampa River, which takes a sharp left at Steamboat Springs before splashing past the yellow canyon walls of Dinosaur National Park for its rendezvous with the Green River. The Green flows through more canyons and hundreds of miles more before joining the Colorado River downstream from Moab in Canyonlands National Park. That’s where this water underfoot was going.

Unless it got diverted to irrigate a hay meadow. Or maybe cool the boilers in a coal plant.

What we didn’t hear was the sound of motorcycles, their mufflers removed, ostensibly in the interest of safety but more truthfully to satisfy the Narcissistic ego’s drive for affirmation of importance. No planes droned overhead, their passengers oblivious to the wonders below, focused instead on getting to a place. True, we had made noise in our journey to find this place. Our existences are compromises.

In a further compromise, we continued up the road, unobstructed except for the lingering partial snowbank, to the divide. From there we could see across three or four river valleys—the Colorado, the Eagle, the Fryingpan and the Roaring Fork—to Sopris, at the west end of the Elk Range. To the north were mountains of the Park Range near the Wyoming border. The water from this divide flowing southward had the more direct route to Canyonlands National Park. The water flowing north into the Yampa had the longer journey.

Then we turned around and returned down the gravel road, past the white-faced cows and their calves, prancing in the hay meadows, and then onto the highway. We were about three hours from the city, a world away.

Click here to read the current assessment. Click here to go to the NIDIS website hosted by the Colorado Climate Center.

Table below from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

From Nevada Public Radio (Doug Puppel):

Decades of wrangling over water rights might just be drops in the bucket compared to the disputes that could arise as the United States copes with a changing global climate.

A new book argues that cooperation and collaboration — along with conservation — are needed in developing effective water policies to cope with a warmer, dryer future.

“The Water Problem: Climate Change and Water Policy in the United States” discusses the challenges faced across the country — from rising sea levels in Florida to a shrinking Ogallala Aquifer to the competing demands on the Colorado River.

Pat Mulroy, former Southern Nevada Water Authority general manager and current fellow at Boyd Law School, edited the book, which includes essays from several water policy experts.

Mulroy said when most people talk about climate change they focus on energy, but when you talk about water and climate change the conversation is different.

“When they talk about climate change, it is all about energy and what kind of energy do we use, but when you talk about water it’s all about how are we adapting,” she said.

Mulroy said areas around the country, not just the western United States, will have to adapt to very different climates than they’ve had. And while some people have declared the drought in California over because of the extraordinary amount of snow and rain the state received this year, Mulroy has a different take.

“One good winter on the Colorado doesn’t solve the problem as you’re seeing right now,” she said.

She said the new normal of a dryer, hotter climate must be dealt with.

“When we talk about the new normal, we’re talking about a world with a very different climate,” Mulroy said.

Mulroy and Jim Lochhead, CEO of Denver Water, co-wrote the chapter on the Colorado River, which provides water to Las Vegas and much of the Southwest. They write that despite the feuds among the states along the river and between environmental, agricultural, and urban interests, management of the river can still provide lessons in effective water policy.

Both Mulroy and Lochhead point to the Colorado River Compact, which was created in the 1920s, as the reason water is so well managed in the West, compared with other regions of the country. Under the compact, all seven states that use the Colorado are considered equal partners. It has meant that the states and the federal government have had to work together on water policy.

That communication and effort are even more important as the earth’s climate changes, Lochhead said.

“Together, the seven states and the federal government I believe can implement programs to innovatively manage the system so it’s going to be sustainable,” he said. “The system is going to change more quickly and we need to be more adaptable and nimble as a system in terms of how we manage the water supply.”

Mulroy said the kind of collaboration seen by the upper and lower basin states is just the kind of collaboration that needs to be done around the country to adapt to climate change. And the former Las Vegas water boss wants this book to be a wake-up call for everyone about how water is used in the face of dramatic changes in our climate.

“This is not a time to be complacent. This is not a time to continue to ignore water the way we have in the past. We take it for granted,” she said.

Just like everything we do has a carbon footprint, Mulroy said everything we have and everything we do has a water footprint as well. She said Las Vegans are actually more aware of that water footprint than people living in other states because we live on the banks of the river and see the bathtub ring at Lake Mead every time we go there.

“The complacency has to end and the conversation has to begin,” she said.

From InkStain (John Fleck):

There is much to like in Where the Water Goes, David Owen’s new book about “life and death along the Colorado River”, but the thing I liked most was the bemused charm with which Owen himself confronts western water’s absurdities, which must be embraced, but which are easily taken for granted.

Here he is in Denver conference room a Continental Divide removed from the Colorado River Basin itself, introduced to (and introducing us to) the strange distinction between “paper water” and “wet water” that underpins much of western water discourse. Water lawyer Kent Holsinger is our guide, describing the cattle ranch near Walden, Colorado, on which he grew up:

A stream crosses the ranch, and the Holsingers draw water from it, but their right to do so isn’t based on the fact that their property is adjacent to its banks, as it would be in the East. “Water law in Colorado and most states in the West is based on the doctrine of ‘prior appropriation,’” he said. That doctrine holds that the first person to make “beneficial use” of water gains the right to use that quantity for that purpose forever.

I was amused to note that Amazon has categorized Owen’s book in “General Western US Travel Guides” (where it happily is the #1 New Release). But on reflection, the choice made sense. Structure in a narrative like this is always a great challenge, and some of our best books about rivers (think Fradkin’s River No More as one shining example) have used the “headwaters to sea” device. Here Owen deploys it effectively, taking us along on his travels as he follows the Colorado’s twisting path from the Rocky Mountains to the Sea of Cortez. I never would have called this a “travel guide”, but on reflection could see it serving solid road trip duty.

By itself, the travelogue is delightful – his side trip into the RV culture of Quartzite on the desert Colorado’s Arizona bank left me full of writerly admiration. Who has travelled the Lower Colorado in winter and not pondered the strange immensity of the human experience spread across the great snowbird RV parks? This is the charm of Owen’s writing, the slightly self-deprecating way he invites us along as he visits interesting people and places, learning new things along the way.

But within the geographical structure, Owen is doing something more subtle, leading us through the ways in which society and river interact as we go through the complex motions of moving water out of the river channel and doing with it what we do. By the book’s end, he’s easily and gently laid a foundation that allows a discussion of the hard stuff, as he leads us through the effect the global food market has on Larry Cox’s Imperial Valley farm, and therefore on the Colorado River’s water:

“Even on the citrus we grow – lemons for export have to be different sizes from lemons for domestic. Then we’ve got fancy grade, choice grade, standard grade. We put up thirty-two different packs, between lettuce and broccoli and mixed lettuce and sleeved romaine – and it’s okay, but you kind of feel like a poodle jumping through hoops.”

Ultimately the hard stuff includes the recognition that the Colorado River’s problems really are hard, not amenable to easy “rewrite the Law of the River” or “abandon prior appropriation/Imperial/Las Vegas” narratives, and it is to Owens’ credit that he ably sums up this no-easy-fixes reality.

Even water nerds who think they know everything about the Colorado River me will likely learn stuff they didn’t know, but you’re not the book’s primary audience. Y’all should pick it up. But really, Where the Water Goes is a water book for everyone else.