Snow levels throughout the Colorado River basin are strikingly low. That puts the region on course for an extraordinarily dry summer and political tension over shrinking reservoirs.
A new water supply outlook for the month of February is the worst in the last 35 years. Across the region, it’s not hard to see why. Take a look at a map of snow totals across the West and you’ll see an awful lot of red. Every single region where federal authorities track snowpack is below average for this time of year. Most of them have half of normal snow or less.
More than two thirds of the Colorado River starts as mountain snow. Across the Colorado River basin, the mountains are only holding 58% of normal for this time of year. On a graph tracking snow totals by year, 2026 slumps as a solitary line on the bottom — the lowest-ever regionwide snow measurements since tracking began in 1986.
Now, water managers across the region are starting to wring their hands about the potential consequences.
Vineetha Kartha, Colorado River programs manager at the Central Arizona Project, keeps a close eye on snow data. The Central Arizona Project brings water from the river to the Phoenix and Tucson areas through a system of canals and pumps.
At CAP’s most recent board meeting, Kartha briefed the agency’s leaders and painted a grim picture.
“December was dry,” she said. “November was dry, October was dry, January was dry, and this trend seems to be continuing.”
She called some of the numbers “abysmal” and listed off a number of mountain rivers where low snow totals are likely to drive down water levels in the region’s reservoirs. That includes the nation’s second-largest reservoir, Lake Powell, where low levels could force the shutdown of hydropower turbines inside Glen Canyon Dam.
Kartha said those “devastating impacts” could come as soon as this summer if conditions stay hot and dry. This year’s conditions are already close to the most pessimistic forecasts made months ago.
The latest downturn in Colorado River conditions comes amid a 26-year megadrought that has strained the water supply for nearly 40 million people. Now, the sharp drying trend is revealing how current water management policies are struggling to keep up with the impacts of climate change.
Federal water authorities can help stave off problems at Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam by releasing water from other upstream reservoirs in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado. That’s part of a program called the Drought Response Operations Agreement, or DROA. They released water from Wyoming’s Flaming Gorge Reservoir during a 2022 dry spell, but hit pause after a snowy winter.
Kartha said federal officials are looking into similar releases in response to this winter’s dry conditions, but have not yet said which reservoirs they would draw from or how much water would be released. Even that contingency plan, she said, might not be enough.
“Even with that DROA release,” Kartha said. “It is quite possible that there might still be a need for reductions into Lake Powell releases.”
Reductions to the amount of water released from Lake Powell could open the door to big legal issues between the states which share the Colorado River. The upstream states — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico — are legally required to send a certain amount of water downstream. Reduced releases from Lake Powell could cause flows to drop below that amount, violating a century-old legal agreement between those upstream states and their downstream counterparts of Arizona, California and Nevada.
