In case you are studying this on the East Coast, congratulations on the hotter climate you’re lastly getting this week. It was chilly and snowy for some time there. Right here within the West, we want we’d been in your footwear. Spare a thought for the tens of hundreds of thousands of us who reside on the opposite aspect of the continent, the place a disaster is unfolding.
In Colorado, the place I reside and grew up, this winter has been particularly heat and dry. Final 12 months closed with the warmest December within the historical past of recordkeeping. It was 8.9 levels hotter than the typical from 1991 to 2020, and the warmest of all in a document that goes again to the late nineteenth century. Over this previous weekend, my neighbors and my household walked with our canines and our youngsters in T-shirts and shorts, as a result of it was within the mid-60s in Colorado Springs. About 60 miles north, my household in Denver noticed a brand new document excessive of 68 levels—on February 15.
However temperatures usually are not the one motive this winter is a disaster. This 12 months, our snowpack is among the many lowest ever measured, which implies it gained’t be sufficient to fill the rivers which might be born in our mountains, which feed reservoirs and water farms from right here to Los Angeles. Snow is lastly coming to the mountains this week, however we nonetheless can’t keep away from one of many worst water years in fashionable historical past. The West is already experiencing the worst drought we have now seen in 1,200 years, as our junior senator, John Hickenlooper, jogged my memory in an e-mail over the weekend. Colorado politicians should be attuned to those dynamics: “The snowpack is just about as massive as all of our reservoirs mixed. That’s why winters like this one are so terrifying,” he wrote. Drought can imply financial catastrophe.
Hickenlooper, who was additionally the state’s governor and the mayor of Denver, isn’t a person given to hyperbole. It truly is that dire. Until plenty of snow falls quickly, Colorado’s surroundings and economic system will take an enormous hit. Ski resorts are dropping cash now. Within the spring, rivers that often provide waist-high whitewater rapids and fishing swimming pools will as a substitute be a trickle; in the summertime, farmers will lose peach crops. Hydrologists, hearth scientists, and local weather researchers are bracing for summer time too; their spectrum of fear ranges from concern to precise panic.
“It’s as dangerous as you assume it’s,” Russ Schumacher, the Colorado state climatologist, informed me. On high of the continuing, decades-long drought within the area, all of Colorado is in a snow drought too. The quantity of water saved within the snowpack is the bottom it’s been at this level in winter since at the least 1987, when complete measurements started, he mentioned. Going again to older information, a few of which date from the Mud Bowl, the 2025–26 water 12 months is the third-worst ever measured. Within the two worse years, snowpack measured about 40 to 42 % of common at this level in winter; this 12 months, Colorado is sitting round 58 % of median total, and decrease in some areas.
Climatologists say {that a} weak La Niña sample within the Pacific is partly in charge, parking a high-pressure “heartbreak ridge” farther east than normal, which frequently pushes moisture away from the mountains. However the abysmal snowpack can be inflicting a nasty suggestions loop, permitting the mountains to heat greater than normal. The sample might lastly break this week, and “we positively have time to make up floor,” Allie Mazurek, a climatologist on the Colorado Local weather Heart, informed me. However she additionally cautioned that “at this stage, it’s wanting virtually inconceivable for us to get again to a mean snowpack.”
Schumacher’s predecessor, the longtime state climatologist Nolan Doesken, used to say that Colorado’s snowmelt is effectively behaved. Rain is available in a flash and is gone simply as shortly, however we all know the place snow falls, the place it should lie in wait, and which rivers it should feed months later. Flakes accumulate on chilly floor, and when the Rockies keep chilly the best way they need to, the snow stays for a lot of months. And the encircling air stays colder with snowpack than with out it. This winter, temperatures are hovering 10 to 12 levels above regular in northwestern Colorado—temperatures that area wouldn’t be seeing if the bottom had been lined in snow, Mazurek mentioned.
Western water displays use a metric known as snow water equal, which is simply what it feels like, to estimate how a lot water will movement into rivers when the snow melts. Since 1987, the Snowpack Telemetry Community, SNOTEL, has measured snowpack by weighing the snow that falls at tons of of stations throughout the West, together with greater than 100 presently energetic ones in Colorado. Different measurements are taken by hikers who snowshoe as much as designated spots and measure the snowpack by hand. Local weather scientists have been doing this for many years. Final week, the snow water equal within the Colorado River basin was tied for the bottom ever recorded, in line with Brad Udall, a senior water scientist at Colorado State College and an knowledgeable on the Colorado River.
That snowpack varieties the headwaters of rivers together with the Colorado, the Rio Grande, and the Arkansas. And the Colorado River feeds the 2 largest reservoirs in the USA: Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Each reservoirs are critically low and have been for years: Powell is about 25 % full, and Mead is at about 34 %. If Powell’s water stage drops one other 40 or so ft, which it might this 12 months, there gained’t be sufficient water to generate hydroelectric energy at Glen Canyon Dam. Water managers are beginning to fear about “useless pool” too, by which the lake will get too low to let water movement via Glen Canyon towards Lake Mead; they’re more likely to scale back water movement out of Powell this 12 months to keep away from it.
In a lot of the Colorado River’s higher basin—in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming—water isn’t collected in lots of reservoirs; as a substitute, it’s diverted out to 1000’s of small areas, from streams to irrigation ditches. And “this 12 months, there simply isn’t going to be any water in these rivers. Or there can be water, however as a substitute of 12 weeks or 16 weeks of water, it will likely be 4 weeks of water,” Udall informed me. “Beneath western water legislation, individuals can mainly fully dry these rivers up.”
That is dangerous timing, as a result of Colorado and the opposite basin states are presently failing to renegotiate key elements of the more-than-century-old Colorado River Compact, which expire later this 12 months. Together with seven states, the river-management settlement contains the federal Bureau of Reclamation, 30 tribal nations, and Mexico, and controls how the river flows into and out of Lakes Powell and Mead. The states missed a serious deadline on February 14, which signifies that the Bureau of Reclamation will as a substitute impose its personal plan—one which not one of the states are more likely to be pleased with. In Colorado, at the least, some residents are involved that the Trump administration will punish the solidly blue state by merely giving extra water to, say, Arizona, which Donald Trump gained in 2024. That is removed from an irrational fear. In late December, Trump vetoed funding for a pipeline, already beneath development with bipartisan help, that might convey water from a reservoir to rural communities in southeastern Colorado. The battle over the Colorado River might form up in related vogue, pitting state towards state. (In response to a request for remark, a Division of the Inside spokesperson pointed me to a press launch by which Secretary Doug Burgum mentioned that the division had “listened to each state’s perspective” and {that a} “truthful compromise with shared accountability stays inside attain.”)
Additional sooner or later, the consequences of water reductions will spill via the western economic system. Agriculture, water recreation similar to fishing and river rafting, and full mountain ecosystems—each environmental and financial—will falter. For now, although, we’re worrying about our timber budding six weeks too early, and pouring buckets of water round their trunks to maintain them hydrated within the heat. We’re updating our hearth checklists and go baggage throughout red-flag warnings: One went up yesterday as I used to be engaged on this story. Winter hearth watches are irregular, however we’re rising all too accustomed to them. And we’re checking the snow forecast day by day.
