Happy #PiDay
Day: March 14, 2025
Snow #Drought Update: Abysmal #Snowpack Defines Winter for #Arizona and #NewMexico — NOAA
Click the link to read the report on the NOAA website:
March 6, 2025
Key Points
- Another month of extremely dry conditions plagued the Southwest (Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada), leading to deepening snow deficits across already dry basins. Exceptional snow drought continues to persist with the peak snow water equivalent (SWE) dates past for Arizona and New Mexico.
- Lower-elevation snow drought persisted across southern Alaska due to continued warm and dry conditions, with Anchorage Airport recording its driest February on record. Large areas in southwest Alaska and low elevations in south-central Alaska—which are typically snow covered—were (nearly) snow-free as of March 1.
- Moderate snow drought conditions persisted in the northern and central Cascade Range of Washington due to below-average winter precipitation.
- A recent storm cycle brought welcome moisture back to California and Nevada, improving snow drought conditions, but deficits still remain in the region.
- The Upper San Juan, Upper Rio Grande, and Gunnison River Basins provide substantial snowmelt and runoff to the Upper Colorado River Basin, which drains into Lake Powell. Given low snowpack in these basins, monitoring snow conditions will be critical for future water supply as the basins enter the spring snowmelt season.
- The National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center’s outlooks favor a likely colder and wetter pattern over the next month in the West, which could be favorable for snow accumulation.
Snow Drought Conditions Summary
This update is based on data available as of Monday, March 3, 2025 at 12:00 a.m. PT. We acknowledge that conditions are evolving.
Current Conditions
Extremely dry conditions across the West in January transitioned to a more active precipitation pattern in February improving the snowpack for much of the West, particularly in the Sierra Nevada, northern Great Basin, and northern Rocky Mountains. In contrast, much of the southern Rocky Mountains, Arizona, and New Mexico saw very little snowfall over the past month. The worst snow drought conditions continue to be in the Southwest, including southern Utah, southwestern Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. Snow drought conditions also persist in the northern and central Cascade Range of Washington.
Looking Ahead
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation weekly water supply report for the Lower Colorado River Basin predicts unregulated inflows into Lake Powell will be 70% of normal in April–July. This is despite 92% of normal snow water equivalent (SWE) in the Upper Colorado Basin, as Colorado river tributary watersheds across central Utah (the San Juan River Basin, the Green Basin, and Gunnison Basin) saw below-normal precipitation and persistent low soil moisture conditions. Spring storms could help boost snowpack, but erasing the deep seasonal deficits across these basins is unlikely.
Throughout Arizona and New Mexico, above-normal potential for significant wildfires persists through June, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Wildfire season generally begins earlier and peaks later in these states compared to other areas of the West due to earlier peak SWE and a climatologically dry spring before the monsoon season begins.
Several Western U.S. Stations Have SWE Below the 30th Percentile
Rocky Mountain Snow Conditions (Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming)
Northern Rockies
Snowpack has generally improved in the northern Rocky Mountains over the past month, with most hydrologic unit code (HUC) 6 basins reporting near- to above-normal snow water equivalent (SWE). However, the Marias and Upper South Saskatchewan Basins in northwestern Montana are still in snow drought, with SWE at 71% and 73% of normal, respectively. Precipitation over most of the Bighorn Mountains in north-central Wyoming was well below normal over the past month, particularly the southern part of the range. Snow drought conditions are present in the central and southern part of the Bighorn Mountains, where SNOTEL stations are reporting 48–92% of normal SWE.
Central Rockies
Snow drought conditions have persisted and, in some cases, intensified across central and southern Utah and southwestern Colorado. Thirteen SNOTEL stations scattered across south-central and southwest Utah report record-low snow water equivalent (SWE). The Lower Colorado-Lake Mead, Escalante Desert-Sevier Lake, and Upper Colorado-Dirty Devil Basins have 29%, 51%, and 56% of normal SWE, respectively. This is the lowest SWE on record for the Lower Colorado-Lake Mead Basin for this date. The Lower Green Basin, including the south slopes of the Uinta Mountains in northeastern Utah, report 79% of normal SWE.
SNOTEL stations in southwestern Colorado, including stations in the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountains, also report snow drought conditions, with most locations below the 20th percentile SWE. Northwestern portions of the Gunnison Basin also have well-below-normal snowpack. The Upper San Juan, Rio Grande Headwaters, and Gunnison Basins are at 56%, 62%, and 82% of normal SWE, respectively. These basins provide substantial snowmelt and runoff to the Upper Colorado River Basin, which drains into Lake Powell. It will be critical to watch snowpack in these basins heading into the spring snowmelt season. February temperatures were 4–6 °F above normal in much of southern Utah and western Colorado, helping drive snow drought across the region.
Low Snow Water Equivalent in Upper San Juan River Basin
Arizona and New Mexico Snow Conditions
Snow drought conditions remain severe as much of the region is nearing or has passed the dates at which snow water equivalent (SWE) typically peaks for the year. In Arizona and parts of New Mexico, peak SWE typically occurs around March 1, much earlier than most of the mountains in the West. The trend of persistent above-normal temperatures and lack of snowfall continued in February in the mountains across the region.
All but two SNOTEL stations in Arizona and New Mexico report less than 50% of normal SWE, with no snow at some locations. In Arizona, the Verde Basin, which has a median peak SWE date of March 1, is currently at 8% of median peak SWE, and the Little Colorado Basin, which has a median peak SWE date of March 4, is currently at 17% of median peak SWE. In New Mexico, the Upper Rio Grande and Upper Canadian Basins are at 39% and 28% of normal SWE, respectively.
Initial surges of spring snowmelt already occurred at some locations in the Upper Canadian Basin, which is several weeks earlier than normal. February temperatures were 4–6 °F above normal across much of the region, which contributed to increased snowmelt at lower elevations.
#Colorado lawmakers eye new task force to boost water funding — Jerd Smith (Fresh Water News)
Click the link to read the article on the Fresh Water News website (Jerd Smith):
March 13, 2025
Colorado lawmakers, worried that a key source of money for water projects is too easily tapped for other programs, want to create a special task force to examine ways to stabilize and boost funding for things like new water pipelines and conservation programs.
Under Senate Bill 40, a nine-member panel would examine new options to replace severance tax money that is collected on nonrenewable resources, such as oil and gas and some minerals, and is highly variable. A portion of the revenue is used to help Colorado address looming water shortages.
According to state forecasts, by 2050 those shortages could be as high as 740,000 acre-feet of water, under a worst-case planning scenario, or much lower if growth slows and climate change impacts are less than expected. One acre-foot of water equals nearly 326,000 gallons, enough water to serve at least two urban homes for one year.
Like other Western states, Colorado is racing to shore up aging water systems and make existing supplies stretch further as drought and rising temperatures shrink water supplies.
The bill comes as lawmakers wrestle with how to cut $1.2 billion from a state purse hurt by slowing growth and revenue caps.
The measure, sponsored by Sen. Dylan Roberts, D-Frisco, Sen. Cleave Simpson, R-Alamosa, Rep. Karen McCormick, D-Longmont, and Rep. Matthew Martinez, D-Monte Vista, is stalled in the Senate appropriations committee until the legislature completes its budget work, Roberts said.
Roberts said the current budget crisis and previous fiscal storms have resulted in severance tax revenue being tapped to help resolve budget shortfalls in nonwater programs, a situation that hits hard at the state’s ongoing efforts to ensure there is enough water to go around.
“The joint budget committee has swept severance taxes in the past. Not too often, but I worry that it will become a common practice. I and my cosponsors want to get the best minds together on how we better plan for the future,” he said.
The Colorado Water Conservation Board is the state’s primary water planning agency, and helps fund an array of water projects and planning initiatives. Its revenues come from interest on loans, money from the state’s general operating fund, sports betting tax revenues, and severance tax revenues, among other sources.
Late last year, Gov. Jared Polis proposed a budget that largely shielded water programs from major cuts, but it is lawmakers who will make the final decision on how the state’s budget will be balanced this year.
The severance tax has generated $412 million for the CWCB over the past 10 years, according to Kirk Russell, the CWCB’s finance section chief. Most of that goes into a revolving loan fund that helps finance such things as irrigation ditch repairs and pipelines. It isn’t typically used to finance the water agency’s operating budget.
But he said the severance tax fund experiences “a great deal of variability” from year to year.
A bright spot in the funding picture, according to Roberts, is the growth in revenue collected from gambling on sports. According to the Colorado Division of Gaming, sports betting has generated $98 million in revenue since May 2020, when sports betting became legal in Colorado. The majority of that money is now used to help fund the Colorado Water Plan.
Roberts said lawmakers are open to considering a range of options to stabilize water funding, and he said there may be potential to expand the revenue generated by sports betting. In January, the program hit a new high, generating $4.4 million. The previous high occurred in January 2024, when $4.1 million was generated, according to the Division of Gaming.
If the bipartisan task force measure is approved, members would be selected this summer and a final report would be due back to lawmakers by July 15, 2026.
#Colorado Will Require Oil and Gas Companies to Increase Water Recycling for Fracking — Jake Bolster and Martha Pskowski (InsideClimateNews.org) #ActOnClimate
Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Jake Bolster and Martha Pskowski):
March 13, 2025
Freshwater use in oil and gas drilling has come under scrutiny in Colorado as the state faces a historic drought. On Wednesday, March 12, state regulators announced new rules that will require drillers to use more recycled water in their operations and, hopefully, relieve pressure on scarce freshwater resources.
As Colorado continues to produce fossil fuels at record pace, the Centennial State has become awash in a caustic, brackish and chemically-laden fluid known as produced water, a byproduct of the drilling and fracking process.
This water can have high levels of salts, metals and other contaminants, making it more difficult and expensive to treat for reuse than for disposal. Oil and gas companies in Colorado typically dispose of produced water by pumping it back into old, out-of-service wells and other geological formations using injection wells, permanently severing it from the hydrological cycle. Meanwhile, freshwater demand for oil and gas production in Colorado is forecasted to rise in the coming decade as the industry drills deeper vertically and farther horizontally.
The oil and gas industry, whose activity in Colorado accounts for almost 4 percent of U.S. total crude oil output, uses about 11 billion gallons of fresh water annually in Colorado, according to data collected by the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission (ECMC). That’s comparable to the amount of water stored behind a small dam, but accounts for less than one percent of all fresh water used in the state.
“Things are changing quickly” for Colorado as climate change intensifies, said Harmony Cummings, a director of the Green House Connection Center, an environmental nonprofit party to the rulemaking. “How low the reservoirs are is terrifying to me.”
Turning Waste Into a Resource
In 2023, the Colorado state legislature passed HB23-1242 (Water Conservation In Oil And Gas Operations: Concerning water used in oil and gas operations, and, in connection therewith, making an appropriation), which required the ECMC to adopt rules “requiring a statewide reduction in usage of fresh water and a corresponding increase in usage of recycled or reused water in oil and gas operations.”
The bill also created Colorado’s Produced Water Consortium, a body of 31 people including regulators, industry representatives, environmentalists and scientists. The group is studying how produced water that comes to the surface during drilling can be reused in other oil and gas operations to reduce freshwater consumption, and its reports served as the basis for its recommendations to the ECMC.
“The consortium started out with everyone coming in with an agenda,” said Hope Dalton, the consortium’s director. “Then they began to learn from each other and trust each other and really work to create these data-informed recommendations…I think the recommendations are very solid.”
Produced water is a catch-all term for water that flows out of oil and gas wells after conventional drilling or hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. This liquid waste can contain drilling chemicals injected into wells, toxic hydrocarbons like benzene, a known carcinogen, and water dislodged from deep underground that carries sediments, salts, metals like barium, manganese and strontium, and Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials (NORM).
The Produced Water Consortium compiled data on existing water practices in Colorado’s oil and gas industry to inform the rule-making. It found that water diverted for fracking in Colorado totals about 26,000 acre feet a year, or 0.17 percent of the state’s total water use. One acre-foot is 325,851 gallons of water, meaning the oil and gas industry holds rights to about 8.5 billion gallons of freshwater annually.
Between July 2023 and March 2024, according to the consortium’s findings, operators reported to the state that they disposed of 87 percent of their produced water and recycled the remaining 13 percent. Companies reported that 93.2 percent of produced water disposal was into underground injection wells. Much smaller volumes of water are disposed of in pits or discharged into state surface water bodies. The initial data on recycling rates is self-reported by the companies and only reflects the short period of time that reporting has been required.
The Denver-Julesburg basin, or DJ Basin for short, along Colorado’s Front Range is home to a vast majority of the industry’s development and water demand. It is also home to the vast majority of the state’s population, including the metro areas of Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins. From 2019 to 2024, an average of two new fracking wells were completed daily in the DJ Basin, five-and-a-half times the industry’s rate in other basins in the state, according to ECMC data.
Companies in the DJ Basin account for almost three quarters of the industry’s total water use, according to ECMC data from 2022. In the DJ Basin, only 0.4 percent of that water is recycled. The Western Slope, which is more rural, has fewer drilling companies but a much higher rate of recycling produced water for operations, sometimes as high as 100 percent.
Under Colorado’s new regulations, by the beginning of 2026, oil companies must use at least 4 percent recycled produced water across their operations in the state. In 2030, that requirement increases to a minimum of 10 percent.
The ECMC will convene again in 2028 to draft new benchmarks beyond 2030. If a consensus fails to emerge, minimum averages of 20 percent recycled water in 2034 and 35 percent in 2038, as recommended by the Consortium, will become law.
If an operator is unable to meet these thresholds, they would be allowed to purchase “credits” for excess produced water recycled by other operators, but only if those credits would be used in the same basin.
“Increasing recycling doesn’t necessarily equate to a decrease in freshwater” use, said Cummings. If the rate of fracking in Colorado rises faster than the produced water recycling thresholds, it’s possible that produced water reuse and freshwater use could both go up, she said.
Other new rules require oil and gas companies to make quarterly reports on what freshwater is used for, the total amount of water and produced water used in each basin, and figures on emissions from truck traffic, among other statistics. Operators will also be required to report how they would meet produced water reuse thresholds. The ECMC could issue penalties to companies that don’t comply with the new rules.
But Cummings worried those penalties aren’t onerous enough. There are “no real teeth” in the enforcement mechanisms, said Cummings, who spent eight years working in the oil and gas industry. If given the proper combination of regulation and incentives, she is confident companies could recycle produced water at greater rates than Colorado is requiring.
“I’ve seen them do incredible projects when profits are on the other side of that,” she said.
Record low March 1 #snowpack in some #NewMexico watersheds — John Fleck (InkStain.net) #RioGrande #ColoradoRiver
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain.net website (John Fleck):
March 4, 2025
The preliminary March 1 runoff forecast from Karl Wetlaufer, the federal government employee at the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service who provides vital information to help us make informed water management decisions, is yikes:
As Wetlaufer noted in the email discussion he distributes each month to New Mexico water managers, it’s a bit tricky this year, because early precipitation last fall fell as rain, not snow. That helps the runoff by wetting soils in the high watersheds, but doesn’t show up in the snowpack numbers. So yes it’s bad, but not quite as bad as it appears if you only look at the snowpack.
The midpoint flow estimate for Otowi on the Rio Grande is 205,000 acre feet, 36 percent of the long term average. It could be higher or lower, depending on what happens in the next few months. But as Friend of Inkstain Rolf Schmidt-Petersen pointed out in the comments last month:
With that in mind, I give you the four-week Evaporative Drought Demand Index, which federal scientists at NOAA and the National Integrated Drought Information System provide to help us make good decisions about water management:
