Officials warn the 40 million people relaying on the Colorado River’s water should take recent weather increases with a grain of salt.
An “atmospheric river” has pummeled California with weeks of heavy rain and the Rocky Mountains are getting buried with snow.
More eyes are now turning to the snow-laden mountains that keep the river flowing and help fill the nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell. Those reservoirs have dropped to historic lows — jeopardizing hydropower for millions of people and threatening the need for costly modifications to the dams that hold the water back.
Udall said a string of wet years is unlikely because of rising temperatures driven by climate change. Since 1970, temperatures in the Colorado River basin have gone up by 3 degrees Fahrenheit. Those higher temperatures have already caused a 15% drop in streamflows across the region. Every 10 years, NOAA moves the three-decade window that it uses for averages. But the rapidly accelerating effects of climate change mean the current window from 1991 to 2020 sticks out from previous 30-year periods because it includes the hottest-ever period in America’s recorded history.
Cynthia Campbell, who has advised the city of Phoenix on water law for over a decade, knows this firsthand. The nation’s fifth-largest city, it gets more than one-third of its water from the Colorado River. Water allocation across the basin is governed by a 1922 legal agreement that hasn’t been substantially rewritten to meet the needs of a changing region. Some experts suggest that agreement — the Colorado River Compact — should be replaced to meet the modern demands of a region with sprawling fields of crops and booming urban populations.
In the meantime, cities have gotten creative to stretch finite quantities of water over their growing populations. Those efforts have not been changed by this winter’s strong mountain snow or the weeks of rain that have drenched California, causing major flooding and damages.
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