After another week of severe winter weather, levels in California’s recovering water reservoirs have continued to rise, signaling good news for the state’s summer water supplies.
This follows weeks of considerable rain and snowfall in California since the start of 2023.
It’s not even March yet, but the mountains that feed the Colorado River already have seen more snow this winter than they normally would through an entire snow season.
And with some snow in the forecast, there’s still more time for that snowpack to grow.
Water levels in Lake Powell dropped to a new record low on Tuesday. The nation’s second-largest reservoir is under pressure from climate change and steady demand, and is now the lowest it’s been since it was first filled in the 1960s.
Water levels fell to 3,522.16 feet above sea level, just below the previous record set in April 2022. The reservoir is currently about 22% full, and is expected to keep declining until around May, when mountain snowmelt will rush into the streams that flow downstream to Powell.
With a much improved rainfall season and snowpack — at least for one year — the water allocation outlook for the area appears to be looking much better than in past years.
The federal Bureau of Reclamation has stated it’s requesting a 100 percent water allocation locally for Class 1 Friant contractors. In addition is stated it plans to request a 20 percent allocation for Class 2 contractors.
Upper Colorado River Basin states have a new $125 million pot to rent and dry agricultural land and keep more water in the drought-plagued waterway, in a major expansion of a previous conservation pilot announced by the Biden administration’s Bureau of Reclamation.
You would have to be at least a septuagenarian to remember “Rebel Without a Cause,” a 1955 movie that starred James Dean and depicted the lives of aimless teenagers.
The film’s most memorable scene was a game of chicken in which two boys raced cars side by side toward a cliff and the first one to bail out was the loser. The “winner,” however, died when his car hurtled over the cliff.
The ongoing dispute over Colorado River water comes down largely to math: How much water should each state and region lose as reservoir levels continue to decline?
California has one interpretation of how to divvy up the cuts, and six other states that depend on the river have a different formula.
Figuring out where the Colorado River’s water goes after Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam can be challenging to understand and is often incorrectly stated. So when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation published forecasted use of Colorado River water it is essential to analyze the numbers.
According to the USBR, the forecasted use for 2023 in the lower Colorado River basin is divided four ways: Nevada, Arizona, California and Mexico.
Snowpack has been running well above average this winter across the Colorado River watershed. It’s a rare bright spot after 23 years of grinding megadrought brought the driest conditions in 1,200 years to the basin that supplies 40 million people in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and Mexico.
Should the generous rains and mountain snows continue into spring, they could help head off a deeper water crisis, including perhaps an unprecedented loss of hydropower generation from severely depleted Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
The seven states that depend on the Colorado River have missed a Jan. 31 federal deadline for reaching a regionwide consensus on how to sharply reduce water use, raising the likelihood of more friction as the West grapples with how to take less supplies from the shrinking river.
In a bid to sway the process after contentious negotiations reached an impasse, six of the seven states gave the federal government a last-minute proposal outlining possible water cuts to help prevent reservoirs from falling to dangerously low levels, presenting a unified front while leaving out California, which uses the single largest share of the river.
