Click the link to read the article on the Weather 5280 website (Matt Makens). Here’s an excerpt:
There’s a lot of snow in those Rocky Mountains, the Sierras, and the Cascades to help the water situation across the American West, and the snowpack is so much more impressive than we had expected. Let’s break it down closer to the river-basin level across the Western U.S.
For a video discussion, here, the written form follows…
Focusing on the Colorado River, there’s a lot of water upstream that’s going to flow into the reservoirs this spring and summer (yes, much will be lost to soil penetration, too, considering soils in these areas aren’t very healthy yet…How much of this is going to contribute to Lake Powell? More than last year and what’s ‘normal,’ that’s for sure.
That’s an excellent graph to see. Yet, a greater perspective reminds us that Lake Powell is desperate for a lot more water than just this one season can provide. Lake Powell’s current percent of average storage is only 38 percent, which is lower than last year and historically low.