Data

New technology can reduce water demand for irrigation by anywhere from 20% to 72% without hampering daily operations.

These maps and visualizations let you interact with vital data on our water supply.

Wastewater can inform public health departments of new variants in the community, but the data collected is still inconclusive.

The snowpack that 40 million people rely on for water was supposed to provide a bounty this year. Instead, much of it melted away fast and early — part of a long-term trend associated with climate change.

As drought and climate change sap the Colorado River, even the water in the Upper Basin’s high-elevation reservoirs isn’t enough to protect the larger system.

We talk with Water Desk consultant Geoff McGhee about some of the ways that data visualizations can help journalists tell stories about water. We discuss dashboards on our website that allow users to track and analyze data on drought, precipitation, the snowpack and major dams and reservoirs.

Experts warn that climate change has rendered old assumptions outdated about what the Colorado River can provide, leaving painful water cuts as the only way forward.

A major science report that highlights scientific shortcomings and opportunities in the Basin could aid water managers as they rewrite the river's operating rules.

Rather than raising everyone’s water prices, we propose a customized approach that lets individual consumers decide whether to pay higher prices.

The snowpack is crucial to the West’s water supply, ecosystems and economy. But climate change threatens to make the region’s snowpack thinner and less reliable. We talk to a leading snowpack researcher about how scientists are analyzing the past, present and future of the West’s snow.