The Colorado River near Moab, Utah, in December 2019. Photo by Mitch Tobin / The Water Desk.
Drones can provide a fascinating perspective on the world, revealing views that are impossible to see from the ground.
My new website, dronereporters.org, provides practical advice for using drones for photography.
For journalists and others, drones can engage and educate audiences by offering helpful or unusual vantage points.
In my own specialty of Western water issues, I’ve found the drone’s-eye view invaluable for telling the story.
For the past seven years, I’ve used a drone to capture photos and videos of key water-related locations in the American Southwest as part of my work for The Water Desk. This imagery is available for free download through our multimedia library.
I created dronereporters.org to share lessons learned while flying my drone in the Four Corners states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. Although my portfolio focuses on water issues, nearly all of my advice applies to any subject matter.
While the site is primarily geared toward journalists, I believe it will also be of value to anyone who flies drones.
My basic setup: Mavic 2 Pro drone, controller, landing pad, batteries, charger, and carrying case. Photo by Mitch Tobin / The Water Desk.
Principles: the basics of flying a drone, such as getting certified by the FAA, finding interesting locations to photograph and operating your system in a safe, ethical manner.
Gear essentials: a description of the equipment that I’ve been using, from the pre-flight checklist to the landing pad, plus other pieces of technology that are helpful.
Photography tips: the basic concepts of photography still apply when using a drone, but some ideas are especially important when your camera is flying.
Video tips: there are many ways to move your drone and steer the viewer’s attention, so I offer examples of useful techniques.
To see more drone (and ground-based) imagery of key water locations in the Southwest, please visit The Water Desk’s multimedia library on this site or consult our full library of high-resolution photos at waterdesk.photos.
A summer visitor boating at Seminoe State Park. (courtesy Wyoming State Parks & Cultural Resources)
This story was originally published by WyoFile on May 29, 2026.
A proposed pumped-water electricity storage facility at Seminoe Reservoir could decimate the prized Miracle Mile trout fishery on the North Platte River and jeopardize a bighorn sheep herd that wildlife officials rely on to support the species’ populations in other areas, critics of the $4 billion project say.
Anglers, business owners and wildlife biologists joined state and federal regulatory officials Thursday to testify before the Legislature’s Travel, Recreation, Wildlife and Cultural Resources Committee. They cautioned that a primary federal permitting review — by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — is too lax on “acceptable” impacts and riddled with inaccurate assumptions fed to it by project developer rPlus Hydro.
“These concerns are not theoretical for us,” Casper Mayor Ray Pacheco told the legislative panel. “Casper relies directly on the North Platte River for drinking water, wastewater treatment, recreation, tourism and the quality of life.”
The Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s concerns regarding impacts to the Ferris-Seminoe bighorn sheep herd, mostly due to blasting and industrial traffic during the project’s five-year construction period, “may be unresolvable,” one department official said, adding that the agency still has an opportunity to object to the project.
The Legislature’s Travel, Recreation, Wildlife and Cultural Resources Committee hears public testimony in Casper. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile) Credit: Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile
The company’s touted enhancement to the electrical grid is actually a net energy loss, others claimed. Several commenters were concerned about the effect of warmer water temperatures on trout. They cautioned that rPlus Hydro’s assurance that its project will only minimally raise temperatures is based on an analysis of five years of data from the 2010s that is outdated and doesn’t account for climate change-driven drought that has resulted in higher stream water temperatures and has helped sap Seminoe Reservoir to just 32% of its storage capacity today.
“I think we’re all acutely aware of what’s going on on the Colorado River system and with Flaming Gorge,” Baggs Republican Sen. Larry Hicks said, referring to the drought and water crisis wreaking havoc in the West. “The way I understand the analysis is that there’s going to be many more low water years.”
Seminoe pumped water storage project
“Pumped water storage” involves pumping water uphill during daytime “off-peak demand” hours for electricity when wind and solar power are plentiful and wholesale electricity is cheapest, according to rPlus Hydro. The pumped water would be temporarily stored in a to-be-constructed reservoir above the current reservoir and released to generate hydroelectricity during higher-demand evening hours.
The company proposes building a 13,400-acre-foot reservoir in the Bennett Mountains overlooking Seminoe Reservoir near the dam — one of several reservoirs on the North Platte River. The facility provides “energy‑storage.” “Think of it as a ‘water battery’ that stores energy generated when demand is low,” the company told WyoFile. “When demand increases, water is released from the upper reservoir back into Seminoe, driving hydroelectric turbines to produce electricity.”
“It’s an enormously large project to meet Wyoming’s future energy needs,” rPlus Hydro Deputy General Counsel Kevin Baker told the legislative committee, adding that it would help lower the cost of electricity. “Pumped [water] storage is actually one of the longest duration, most effective and most cost-efficient types of energy storage that’s on the market today.”
Baker said that FERC’s analysis of the project suggests the Seminoe project represents a $200 million annual savings to ratepayers. Further, according to Baker, FERC has suggested, the “absence of this project carries with it its own set of impacts: reduced resource adequacy, higher cost to ratepayers, and the likely need to pursue other projects that may impose greater environmental impacts or plans to the state.”
Hicks objected to the notion that the project will enhance electrical availability or affordability in Wyoming, noting that the state is a net-electrical exporting state, and that rPlus Hydro is relying on federal tax credits to help finance the project.
Anglers attempt to land a trout at Miracle Mile on the North Platte River. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
Despite those facts, Baker responded, the energy storage function does improve reliability and affordability throughout the western grid, including Wyoming. The project, he said, “does not consume serious amounts of water.
“The water,” he added, “will be protected. The fish habitat will be protected. Casper will still have the opportunity to use it as drinking water. Irrigation will still occur. The project will not affect Wyoming’s waters.”
Several people, including local elected officials, Trout Unlimited and local businesses, took issue with Baker’s claims, citing what they say is a flawed federal review process that hasn’t dutifully tested the company’s claims or considered locals’ concerns.
“I think what concerns me the most about this project is the precedent that it sets,” said CiCi Oliver of the Ugly Bug Fly Shop in Casper, which employs 45 people and is dependent on the North Platte River fishery. “This proposal requires exemptions from existing land use and wildlife protections in order to move forward. It is my belief that if a project only works by loosening protections that were specifically created to safeguard habitat and sensitive resources, then perhaps it is not suited for the location in the first place.”
What now?
The FERC is the primary permitting agency for the project because of its reliance on federally managed water storage reservoirs and hydroelectric systems on the North Platte River. That’s a source of heartburn for many stakeholders, including state regulatory agencies, according to Thursday’s testimony.
Members of the Travel Committee lamented that the Legislature doesn’t have a direct role in setting terms for the project. But it concluded that rPlus Hydro and FERC did not meet expectations to engage with locals during the permitting review process, which was initiated some five years ago.
So what can state lawmakers do?
There are still permitting steps where the Legislature can exert its influence, committee leadership noted.
The federal Bureau of Land Management is a cooperating agency for the project, and agency officials noted that when the FERC issues its final environmental impact statement — expected in June — they may request an amendment process if the BLM is not satisfied with natural resource protections. Wyoming Game and Fish also has an influential say in whether it is satisfied with the FERC’s final review.
Plus, others noted, the project still must go before Wyoming’s Industrial Siting Council for approval.
The committee’s cochairs suggested drafting a letter to Wyoming’s congressional delegation, as well as FERC and other permitting agencies, imploring them to address concerns expressed by Wyoming stakeholders. The committee approved that idea in a unanimous vote.
WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
Margie Padilla is worried that a proposed data center near her home in Imperial, Calif., will increase power and water costs for her family. Credit: Steven Rodas/Inside Climate News
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
IMPERIAL, Calif.—The new data center proposed for a quiet city about 115 miles east of San Diego came across people’s radars in different ways.
For patrons of the deli on West Aten Road, it was the white “Not In My Backyard” signs jutting out of lawns.
For local irrigation district workers, it was something called an “electric service application.”
For Margie Padilla, it was a rant on Facebook.
The 43-year-old mom came across a post online while she had a few minutes to scan social media last spring after a day spent tending her garden and taking care of her two boys.
“Somebody was complaining about this center,” Padilla said. “I was like, ‘Whoa, what’s going on here?’”
What’s going on is the second-largest new data center being considered statewide, which would be less than half a mile from Padilla’s stucco home in the center of Imperial Valley. If finished by 2028, as the developer expects, the at least 950,000-square-foot, two-story data center could be the largest operating statewide, taking up 17 football fields’ worth of land.
The roughly $10 billion, 330-megawatt data center would require 750,000 gallons of water a day to operate, said developer Sebastian Rucci, who insists electricity and water costs won’t rise due to the data center.
“We have studies on the air. We have studies on the water. The electricity could be handled,” Rucci said. “We did our homework.”
Imperial officials haven’t quelled local concerns, only noting that the project is facing litigation and that the center’s long-term impacts on utilities haven’t been determined.
On top of the financial burden of maintaining her family’s health, gas and grocery expenses strain Padilla’s budget and she’s worried a new data center will only increase water and power costs. Padilla, who first heard of the data center a year ago, has only grown more concerned and she’s not alone.
Some residents would see it from their backyards.
“I can only imagine the rates going up once that data center is up and running,” she said, shading her eyes from the beaming sun.
This is one of two dozen data centers expected to open in California in the next few years.
Growing concern and regulatory gaps
A majority of respondents to a nationwide poll by the US Water Alliance’s Value of Water campaign share Padilla’s worries, with 54 percent extremely or very concerned about the effect data centers will have on water quality, water supply and costs in their area.
In its first question about data centers since the poll began in 2016, two-thirds of voters said it was important for their state to have a plan for the effects of data centers on water in the coming years.
“I suspect that as data centers continue to be part of the broad conversation, then these numbers will probably continue to go up as people are more concerned about the impacts they have on the things that affect them and their communities, like supply, quality and cost,” said Scott Berry, the senior advisor on policy and external affairs at the US Water Alliance, from Water Week in Washington D.C. this month.
More than 90 percent of data centers in the U.S. get most of the water they need for cooling from municipal systems, estimated Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside.
During the hottest summer days, a large 100-megawatt facility can use about 1 million gallons of water for evaporative cooling. That amount is the same as about 10,000 people’s daily water use at home, Ren said.
But those centers require “zero water for many days of the year when it’s cool outside,” he said.
Some data centers are exploring alternatives like treated wastewater or graywater for cooling instead of drinkable water, providing residents and officials with options that could reduce strain on local water supplies.
California doesn’t require AI data centers to report water usage, and the state’s Water Resources Control Board does not maintain a specific list of water rights held by data centers. Although residents are working to require more transparency about water use from data centers, recent efforts to require the facilities’ owners to report how much water they use to the state have faltered.
On top of the data center boom in California, the hundreds of water districts, a deepening Southwestern megadrought and the diminishing of the Colorado River increasingly complicate water issues.
“Water is not purely an environmental issue. In many places, it is fundamentally an infrastructure challenge.”— Shaolei Ren, University of California, Riverside
Also, while data centers can take as little as two to three years to build, developing new water sources can take as long as 20 years, said Ren.
Plans for the steep increase in water demand from California data centers inevitably focus on infrastructure, experts said.
“Water is not purely an environmental issue,” Ren noted. “In many places, it is fundamentally an infrastructure challenge.”
The amount of electricity a data center uses, to some degree, determines how much heat it produces, and consequently how much cooling it requires and, in turn, how much water it needs.
The Imperial County data center is one of 24 planned for completion across California by 2030, according to the latest information gathered by analysts at Cleanview, a market intelligence platform.
Based on the about 1.7 GW of electricity the proposed data centers would use, with at least two projects for which there aren’t energy consumption figures, water infrastructure upgrade costs just for the demands of the centers in the state could run from about $200 million to $800 million, Ren said.
“This number assumes that California data centers’ water use intensity is the same as the national average,” he explained.
There is no central permitting authority for data centers in California, and most are overseen by city and county governments, according to the California Public Utilities Commission. Data Center Map shows 286 of the facilities currently operating in California.
While California’s size and tech focus lead some to expect many more data centers here, the cost and availability of power and land, as well as the general tax and regulatory climate, have been hurdles to building them out, according to the Data Center Coalition, which represents big corporations like Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft.
Nonetheless, California trails only Virginia and Texas in the number of individual data center locations, but its centers have much lower total new electricity capacity, which may also indicate lower water demand.
A research team at the University of California, Riverside, recently found that data centers could collectively require 697 to 1,451 million gallons per day (MGD) of new water capacity nationally through 2030. New York City’s average daily supply is about 1,000 MGD.
Currently, data centers are estimated to use about 39 billion gallons of water nationally each year, Khara Boender, the senior manager for state policy at the Data Center Coalition, said, citing market research from Bluefield.
“I know when we start to talk about billions of gallons of water in a year, that sounds absolutely crazy,” Boender said. “Looking at how that falls into context with some of these other large water users, I think that that kind of contextualization could be surprising to folks.”
Alfalfa irrigation in California’s Imperial Valley alone uses more than 800 billion gallons a year, an April essay in Outside highlighted. The beverage industry uses 533 billion gallons of water a year and the semiconductor industry uses 59 billion gallons, Boender noted.
But spikes in water needs for data centers can lead to bottlenecks in small community water systems, Ren, at the University of California, Riverside, noted. “Only comparing the annual totals can obscure the real water challenge,” he said.
There is no single fix for the pressure data centers are placing on water supplies across the state, which will be different depending on the location and water systems where each facility is built, said Shivaji Deshmukh, the general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California—the largest supplier of treated water in the U.S. The district serves 19 million people in six California counties.
“Every community—even within our service area—is different in terms of costs, what type of supply they have. Some regions have access to groundwater. Some have access to treated wastewater or recycled water somewhere along the coast,” Deshmukh said.
So industries, most of which require water for cooling, will look to satisfy that thirst from different sources, depending on their location.
“Imperial Irrigation District is one where I know they’re discussing … installation of data centers in their area,” Deshmukh said.
The imperial dilemma
The plot of dirt on West Aton Road betrays nothing of the colossal data center that could one day sit on the land. Owner Sebastian Rucci hopes to have the facility up and running by the summer of 2028, he said.
Rucci, who is also a lawyer, has purchased 235 acres for his data center so far. He says the data center will allow Google to train its Gemini artificial intelligence, although Google denies any involvement “in a data center project in Imperial County.”
Before he can begin building on the site, a judge will weigh in on the city of Imperial’s lawsuit against the project, which demands that it clear higher environmental hurdles, including the California Environmental Quality Act—which often draws ire from developers who claim it can needlessly stall proposals. The local water district also has to complete its review of the project.
The site of the proposed data center in Imperial, Calif. Credit: Steven Rodas/Inside Climate News
Rucci is determined, though, citing a series of studies conducted by survey and consulting groups, and by the district itself, which manages water and provides power. He posted those reports online to show the data center made sense—in part because water and power could be effectively provided to the data center and the land was permitted for industrial use.
The debate between supporters and opponents of the facility has escalated, with the next court date set for the end of April.
With that date in mind, Padilla, the Imperial mother, set out to work in her garden on a balmy Thursday morning.
Donning a green, short-sleeved shirt and flip-flops, she checked on her squash, poked at her cherry tomatoes and dug in her spade to move periwinkle to a better spot for watering. And through it all, she wondered what the thirst of the proposed data center would do to her garden. And her monthly water bill.
Her payment for water, sewer and trash services currently ranges from $90 to $130 a month—more than double what she paid six years ago.
“I’m also afraid they’re going to put [water] restrictions for us, for the residents,” said Padilla, who estimates her family of four uses about 300 gallons of water a day. “That’s going to be harsh on me, particularly, because of my garden. I grow my own food, my own vegetables.”
Margie Padilla tours her garden on April 16, where she holds a carrot that she thinks hasn’t grown well due to drier temperatures in the Imperial Valley. Credit: Steven Rodas/Inside Climate News
Worries over power and water price surges are misguided, Rucci said. He has been considering power and water needs for the 18 months he has worked on the project, he said, and outlined how it would bring various economic benefits to the region, including about 100 permanent jobs post-construction.
Still, Padilla is thinking about other things. She says her two sons were anemic when they were younger, requiring them to eat fresh produce to supplement the iron their bodies needed. Even after treating the condition, the Imperial mom keeps her sons’ diet filled with veggies and fruits. She needs her garden for that.
The Imperial Irrigation District declined to be interviewed for this story but, in a written statement, noted that it has yet to receive a formal request for water for the project.
The District, which provides water and power to all of Imperial County as well as parts of Riverside and San Diego counties, did not have specific estimates of how demand from the data center could impact its costs.
“Water was very concerning to us from the beginning,” Rucci said.
He’s spoken with city officials in Imperial and El Centro to arrange a water deal for the facility, he said, and proposed getting 6 million gallons per day of reclaimed water from both cities.
“Our plan was we would do all the municipal upgrades at our cost, and then we would take the excess water and run it clean to the Salton Sea,” he said.
Those conversations have not paid off, although Rucci said he remains hopeful municipal officials will help him get water for his facility.
“We first tried to do reclaimed water. I still prefer that but that seems to be taking months and I don’t know if that … will happen,” Rucci said. “Probably we’ll just get it from the (Imperial Irrigation District)” by purchasing it for industrial use.
How the center obtains its water may change as its plans are updated, he added.
Through it all, he remains confident the data center will be built in Imperial County and be good for the area.
Carolina Paez disagrees.
The 46-year-old mother’s backyard abuts the data center site. She says she’d be able to hit it with a rock from her property.
Both she and her son have asthma, and she’s worried about the construction dust, potential pollution and noise from the data center. And higher bills.
“I’m not just thinking about the expenses that are going to increase, but also about the things that are going to lose value—for instance, my house,” Paez said in Spanish.
“What am I going to do with this property? Who would even want to live here?”
A team of researchers recorded more than 1,500 data points for soil moisture at Independence Pass in Colorado in July 2025. Photo courtesy of Colin Kinsman.
Western wildfires start and spread because of a whole host of factors—wind, temperature, drought, forest health. But scientists are finding that the most important indicator of where the next big fire might ignite isn’t held in the trees themselves, but in the soil their roots are buried in.
Recent studies demonstrate how soil moisture data can help wildfire experts predict a potential fire’s location and severity. Those studies could eventually aid in developing more precise forecasts for fires across the country.
This link, between how moist the ground is under a forest or grassland and fire risk, is gaining more traction among scientists due to an increasingly expansive network of monitoring equipment.
In Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley, 10 remote soil moisture sensors transmit data hourly, measuring the amount of water in the soil at that specific location and a certain depth, so scientists and researchers can better understand the ecosystem.
In the Rocky Mountain region of northern Idaho and western Montana, the U.S. Forest Service is working to install soil moisture networks at existing remote weather stations to increase the federal government’s observational capacity.
In the Oklahoma grasslands, 120 monitoring sites make up a network for automated soil moisture data collection that spans the whole state, collecting data once every 30 minutes. The network, called the Oklahoma Mesonet, is one of the densest monitoring networks in the world, and is managed in collaboration between the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University and Oklahoma Climatological Survey.
In Colorado’s Garfield County, the Middle Colorado Watershed Council uses soil moisture data to better understand wildfire risk for their mountain communities. The council uses available satellite data as an indicator for wildfire risk through drying trends and overall watershed health.
“It doesn’t look like a lot on the surface,” said Stephanie Kampf, professor of ecosystem science and sustainability at Colorado State University. The sensors are buried underground, collecting soil moisture data from different depths across the West.
But what may not look like much from the surface is a developing network of soil moisture data that could prove invaluable in predicting, and potentially preventing, some of the West’s most destructive fires.
A growing link
The West is in an era of megafires. Decades of fire suppression have put the region in a fire deficit. Fire is an important part of the landscape, but changing climate conditions foster more severe and destructive burns.
Soil moisture data could help better predict the location and severity of these potentially catastrophic wildfires.
“There is growing acknowledgment in fire science that soil moisture is really important,” said Zachary Holden, research ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service and contributor to a 2025 research study that explored soil moisture as a strong predictor for wildfire.
Holden helped create a forecasting model that used archival soil moisture data to estimate wildfire growth from 140 wildfires in the U.S. northern Rocky Mountains from 2012 to 2021, later expanded to include Oregon and Washington.
The forecasting model, now publicly available, aims to be a more detailed tool for prediction as climate change alters our foundational understanding of ecosystems, a model that will combine weather and hydrology.
In addition to Holden’s research, which focuses on the U.S. northern Rocky Mountains, a number of other researchers in the West are linking soil moisture with wildfire prediction, finding that soil moisture and hydrologic conditions are an even stronger predictor for wildfire than drought and weather conditions.
“You can predict whether something is going to be wet or dry, just looking at precipitation patterns, but soil moisture itself gives you the combination of how much water came in, and then how much water went back out through evaporation,” Kampf said.
A 2023 study aimed to better understand the relationship between soil moisture and wildfire risk. According to Erik Krueger, contributor of the study and plant and soil sciences researcher at Oklahoma State University, wildfire researchers were collecting data related to vegetation fuel, fuel load and fuel moisture properties when the relationship between soil moisture and wildfire became clear.
“We just said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this soil moisture database, how can we use it to look at the relationship between when and where wildfires will occur?’” Krueger said.
According to Krueger, scientists have understood that there is a relationship between soil moisture and wildfire, but the data could not be found in one place. “There was no way to quantify [the risk] without the soil moisture data,” he said.
After combining the data, Kruger said, they could better understand wildfire risk.
Wildfire scientists have worked for decades without the soil moisture data that is now becoming available. “We can make their jobs a little bit easier, and make our wildfire prediction a little better,” Krueger said.
A team of field researchers collects data in the rugged terrain that surrounds a soil moisture monitor at Independence Pass in Colorado. Photo courtesy of Colin Kinsman.
Applying the science
It’s not just scientists interested in this link between soil moisture and wildfire. Western land and water managers are seeing the benefits of the emerging fire indicator as well.
“Wildfire isn’t just a forest issue, it’s fundamentally a watershed issue,” said Kate Collins, executive director of Middle Colorado Watershed Council and the Colorado River Wildfire Collaborative in Garfield County, Colorado. “Watershed health and wildfire are just not siloed issues at all, they are inextricably linked.”
But wildfire prevention can be contentious, especially in places like Garfield County, which is considered a wildland urban interface, or WUI, where people live in areas affected by wildfire.
“We do need to have fire in our landscapes regularly,” Kampf said. Routine fire lessens the impact of excess dry fuels in an area, limiting the severity of the burn. And emerging as a tool to plan less severe burns, or prescribed fire, is soil moisture.
Prompted by the increased risk of severe wildfire, the Colorado River Wildfire Collaborative has shifted their focus to mitigation efforts, which include riparian restoration, mechanical thinning of vegetation, creating defensible spaces, and prescribed fire. Each of these efforts not only helps reduce wildfire risk, but also supports soil moisture retention.
The process of building a usable set of soil moisture data is just beginning. Using the data as a tool, particularly in relation to wildfire risk, is relatively new. Building a strong dataset not only takes time, but also additional resources that are still being pulled together.
A new approach’s limitations
Sensors can only collect soil moisture data for the specific soil column they are inserted in, which brings other challenges.
“One is topography, so not just the elevation, but what aspect you are on and sloping around, and then you have the vegetation at that site,” Holden said.
In a high alpine area, soil moisture data collected at one point may not be representative of an entire region. How do you apply one finding across a shifting landscape?
In July 2025, a team with Aspen Global Change Institute set out to answer that question. “Single point moisture data has value in that it can give you an insight into what’s happening in the soil across a watershed,” said Asa DeHaan, research technician at AGCI.
A single watershed has a wealth of different types of soils, especially in complex, mountainous regions like Independence Pass near Aspen, Colorado, where the data was collected. “This one spot is really dry. We need to go out and see, is this the case across a larger area?”
DeHaan and a group of 14 others embarked on a three-day mission of collecting soil moisture data with handheld probes every 5 meters in a 100 square meter area around the monitoring site. “There really was a high variability across this area, kind of what we hypothesized was going to be the case,” DeHaan said.
This idea is called “slope granularity.” AGCI’s continued research on slope granularity aims to understand if the patterns that were recorded among different vegetation types and in different alpine environments may extend to larger landscapes.
According to Colin Kinsman, a team member on the July 2025 trip, the group collected somewhere between 1,500 and 1,700 data points within the region. “All this was in an effort to see what the deviation is across the slope,” Kinsman said, information that is necessary to groups looking to better understand severe wildfire risk.
A collaborative project led by AGCI in July 2025 aimed to better understand the differences in soil moisture in areas of varied topography. Photo courtesy of Colin Kinsman.
Expanding the networks
But the predictive ability of soil moisture monitoring hinges on there being robust measurements and data collection available to wildfire researchers and managers. Integrating soil moisture data is made more difficult by sparse observations across the West.
According to Helen Silver, co-director of the Integrated Rocky Mountain-region Innovation Center for Healthy Soils, IN-RICHES, and Quench soil moisture monitoring programs out of Colorado State University, advancing soil moisture as a tool for wildfire prediction means not only expanding the monitoring network, but also putting all the data in one accessible place.
Silver is working with the U.S. Forest Service to introduce more monitoring sites across Colorado to create a larger network of data. More data could help wildfire managers use the network as a tool for predicting wildfires. “We have a really large opportunity to install more sites that will help with prediction,” Silver said.
But maintenance and installation of such sites is expensive. Together with the Forest Service, Silver is working to bring in more money. “I would love to see federal funds and state funds put towards this,” she said.
But getting the data, having the data and using the data are all separate issues. “What we need is a few champions, a few wildfire scientists that are champions for using this practically, for implementing these new tools,” Krueger said.
Ultimately, soil moisture monitoring can’t predict with total certainty where a wildfire will begin. But Krueger said it could give an additional boost to forecasts. Is that worth the investment? “If it’s your house that is downwind from where the fire is, it probably is,” he said.
This story was produced and distributed by The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to correct information from Colin Kinsman. His team collected 1,500 and 1,700 data points, not 15,000 to 17,000.
Anglers flock to Flaming Gorge Reservoir on Memorial Day weekend. Kokanee salmon and trophy-sized lake trout draw tens of thousands of visitors to the reservoir each year, supporting a recreational economy in southwestern Wyoming and northeastern Utah. (Hannah Romero/Green River Star)
As campers with boats flocked to Buckboard Marina at the start of Memorial Day weekend, Tony Valdez was busy issuing refunds and repairing broken boat ramps. One older Green River man, who walked with two canes, left with his money refunded for the season after discovering he could not safely make it down to the boat slip. Due to dropping water levels at Flaming Gorge Reservoir, the ramp is now buckled, angling up and down like a pitched roof.
“It’s devastating, not just to me, it’s all the marina owners,” said Valdez, who owns Buckboard Marina, south of Green River. “It’s a big loss, and this is a big loss to the community.”
Along the cliffs and shoreline, darker and lighter lines of rock and sand trace the water’s elevations, showing where the water hits when the marina is full, where it hovered this spring and where it dropped after an initial “flush.” Valdez estimates the reservoir has dropped by 7 feet since April.
But that’s not the worst of it. Valdez anticipates that by the end of this summer, the reservoir will be as low as it’s ever been.
Why the drain?
For all its charm as a beloved recreation spot and its utility as a local economic driver, Flaming Gorge Reservoir owes its existence to a legal compact that essentially regards it as an insurance policy in times of drought.
Its primary purpose, according to federal officials and Colorado River Compact scholars, is to serve as a backup water bank to help maintain the Colorado River system. Specifically, Flaming Gorge and a handful of other reservoirs in the upper Colorado River Basin states of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico are key to ensuring a minimum flow of 7.5 million acre-feet of water, on a running 10-year average, at Lees Ferry just downstream of Lake Powell, a massive man-made reservoir straddling the Utah-Arizona border.
Today, after more than 20 years of drought intensified by human-caused climate change, the Colorado River is in crisis, putting at risk massive agricultural irrigation operations that consume about 80% of its water. This past winter saw historically low snowpack in the Upper Colorado River Basin — a primary source for the river’s flow.
This annotated 1963 photo of the Glen Canyon Dam shows the minimum level of Lake Powell, below which would render the dam’s power generation components inoperable. (Bureau of Reclamation)
Combined with record heat in March, Lake Powell is at risk of dropping below Glen Canyon Dam’s “minimum power pool,” the point at which it can no longer produce hydroelectric power, according to water officials. If it falls even lower, the dam, which holds back Lake Powell, could be at risk of structural damage or unable to allow water to flow downstream.
The situation triggered a drought response operations agreement that calls for restricting releases from Lake Powell and an order to draw extra water from Flaming Gorge upstream. In total, water managers will release about 1 million additional acre-feet of water from Flaming Gorge in April 2026 through April 2027.
“These actions are expected to lower [Flaming Gorge’s] elevation by roughly 35 feet over the next year to approximately 59% of capacity,” the bureau said in April.
“The elevations are real critical,” Valdez said. At Buckboard Marina, high water has hovered between 6,030 and 6,040 feet above sea level over the past 50 years, he said. Dropping 35 feet could expose 400 feet of shoreline in some places, including marinas with boat ramps, he said.
Dropping water levels in the Flaming Gorge Reservoir by 35 feet could expose over 400 feet of shoreline in some places, including marinas with boat ramps, according to Buckboard Marina owner Tony Valdez. (Hannah Romero/Green River Star)
If the water elevation continues to retreat, it could reach a point where boats can’t be brought in or out.
“By September, this thing is going to be down to 6,000 feet. That’s it,” Valdez said. “Next year, if it goes below that, there’s no more marina here.”
Setting a course
Water managers set a course in April to “stabilize” Flaming Gorge’s outflow to about 1,100 cubic feet per second, representing the rate needed to achieve the 1 million acre-feet of extra water release, according to the bureau. On top of that, there are two previously planned “flushes” from the Gorge. The first, in early May, temporarily increased the outflow to about 8,600 cubic feet per second to enhance the proliferation of razorback sucker larvae, and a second 72-hour flush beginning June 8 will temporarily increase the outflow to about 4,600 cubic feet per second to discourage the proliferation of smallmouth bass.
So far, Flaming Gorge has dropped from about 3 million acre-feet in April (or 82% capacity) to about 2.83 million acre-feet as of May 25. Meanwhile, water managers warn, “This release plan is subject to change depending on evolving river conditions and weather forecasts.”
Those evolving conditions include forecasted versus actual flows from streams feeding the system. For example, those “unregulated” or natural flows are forecasted to be much lower than normal: 70,000 acre-feet of water into Flaming Gorge during May (28% of average), 175,000 acre-feet in June (45% of average) and 84,000 acre-feet (42%), according to the Bureau of Reclamation.
Water officials caution that water flowing from the Flaming Gorge Dam could change, and that those recreating on the Green River below should monitor release schedules at this website. The bureau also noted, “Water will be colder than usual and will run high and swift during periods of elevated releases.”
Water floats recreation economy
Buckboard Marina went through a similar drop in water a few years ago. The Bureau of Reclamation began pulling water from the Flaming Gorge in 2021, and by 2022, the marina’s water level was at an all-time low. While the reservoir recovered somewhat in 2023 thanks to a good year for moisture, Valdez said, the reservoir has continued to decline since then.
Buckboard Marina owner Tony Valdez stands next to a stake that indicates the extent of dropping water levels at Flaming Gorge Reservoir on Sept. 26, 2022. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
Kokanee salmon and trophy-sized lake trout draw tens of thousands of visitors to Flaming Gorge each year, supporting a recreational economy in southwestern Wyoming and northeastern Utah. But as the lake is drawn down, water recedes from shallow shorelines and fish are forced into a smaller space, essentially shrinking the fishery toward the dam side of the reservoir.
One of Valdez’s primary concerns is that water levels could drop below the ideal elevation for kokanee to spawn in the reservoir.
“I think people don’t realize the economic value it brings,” he said. “It is a big deal when you lose your kokanees.”
Valdez has already lost money this year just from people being concerned about water levels. He estimated that the marina lost roughly $30,000 in cancellations when discussions about releasing water began as early as February.
Other problems also start to arise as the water drops. The marina will lose access to drinking water at 6,010 feet, below their floating pump that supplies potable water. It’s only 7 feet away from the current level.
“That’s scary to me,” Valdez said.
The marina can truck in water from Rock Springs, but it costs about $1,200 to bring in 8,000 gallons, which lasts about two weeks. For Valdez, it feels “asinine” to lose water at a marina.
“Why would we run out of water on a lake?”
Water levels also impact the location of the fuel dock and fuel lines extending to it. If the reservoir sinks too low, it could cost up to $100,000 to adapt, he said.
Drawing down water levels quickly — as happened in early May — can damage marina structures. After the 2021-22 drawdown, Valdez said he spent about $130,000 in repairs.
Buckboard Marina owner Tony Valdez shows a boat ramp that now angles up steeply before dropping down after the reservoir’s water levels dropped several feet. (Hannah Romero/Green River Star)
This time, he’d hoped to keep up. He and a group of 10 men worked to keep pace with the dropping water levels, repairing and modifying ramps. It wasn’t enough.
“The drop was dramatic enough to break all of our approaches, our bridges, our stuff, so it broke a lot of the welds, broke a lot of the structured steel, because it just vertically dropped too fast for the weight,” he said.
When structures go from water to land that quickly, the weight is too much for them to hold up, Valdez said.
“I’m re-rigging everything, and this is only a temporary fix ’til September, because that’s when the season ends.”
The marina should remain mostly functional until the summer season ends, he said. But with extra water releases set to continue through the winter, the lake could drop another 10 to 12 feet by the spring.
“We’re getting into numbers that I don’t even want to talk about,” Valdez said. “I mean, there’s no marina.”
What’s next?
“The guy with the boots on the ground that watches this every day,” as Valdez describes himself, can see what water managers can’t, and he questions whether official numbers and estimates match reality.
“It’s hard to watch this when it’s out of your hands.”
Valdez is critical of the 1922 compact, doubting the legal rationale of sending Wyoming water to places like Arizona. He also wonders about the role of local industries — refineries, coal-fired power plants and trona mines — that use large amounts of water, and the idea of adding more industrial facilities that require even more water, like data centers.
“We don’t have the water to give away,” Valdez said.
Bryan Seppie, general manager for the Joint Powers Water Board for Sweetwater County, Rock Springs and Green River, agrees. “The poor hydrology this past winter has affected most all water users in some form or another,” he said.
His board monitors the Colorado River system closely. Just upstream from Flaming Gorge, the Bureau of Reclamation reduced releases from Fontenelle Reservoir due to poor inflow projections. Although the water will still be enough for river users, the low summer flows will have a negative impact.
“Low river flows typically result in higher water temperatures, which generally leads to higher levels of moss/algae and overall lower water quality,” Seppie said in an email.
What about recovery?
Valdez wonders: What’s the plan to allow the reservoir to bounce back?
Wyoming State Engineer Brandon Gebhart and his staff have warned for months that although Flaming Gorge can serve as a backup to Lake Powell this year, it drains the Gorge’s ability to play a similar role next year, or the year after. It takes time for Mother Nature to replenish the bank.
Rings line the shore of Flaming Gorge Reservoir, showing the drop in the water level at the popular recreation spot that spans the Wyoming-Utah border. (Hannah Romero/Green River Star)
“The big thing that nobody is talking about is the recovery,” Valdez said. “Where is the recovery of our water?”
This year’s drain on Flaming Gorge began at a low point. The reservoir hadn’t fully recovered after the last major pull. Rather than starting at a high point of 6,040 feet, the marina was at about 6,024 feet, he said.
“There’s no recovery plan,” he said. “We can’t just let them keep taking. I mean, where’s this end?”
If there is no grace period for the reservoir to replenish and officials want to take even more in the near future, starting from such a low elevation point, it will be “devastating,” Valdez said.
“The water going down is not the end of the world, it’s the recovery in a timely manner that really matters,” he said. “I can’t preach recovery enough.”
Watching people come to the marina and seeing how happy they are still motivates Valdez to keep going. Despite the drawdown, there’s nowhere else he’d rather be.
“We’re not going to run away. We’re not going to give up,” he said. “We’re going to fight.”
This story was produced by WyoFile, and distributed by The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Eric Balken, Glen Canyon Institute executive director, navigates coyote and seep willow taking hold at La Gorce Arch in Davis Gulch, during a tour of side canyon tributaries and their ecosystems at Lake Powell on Saturday, April 25, 2026. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Stepping lightly over slick, wobbly mud and splashing through ankle-deep water, she approached a small dam created by nature’s engineers.
A Woodhouse toad began croaking, harmonizing with the water trickling through a stack of sticks and chewed logs.
Stutz, the program director of the Glen Canyon Institute, and other environmental advocates looked for the amphibian. They spotted one hiding in the willows next to the stream. A few steps later, they saw another swimming in the water pooled behind the dam.
“That’s a great indicator of really good water quality,” said David Wegner, a founding trustee of the Glen Canyon Institute and former Bureau of Reclamation scientist. “How cool is that?”
As the group continued up Davis Gulch — one of the 127 side canyons that have reemerged as Lake Powell has receded — more beaver dams came into view. Each dam gave the stream a different pitch and rhythm as the water flowed over and through woven branches and twigs.
Willows, which started at shin height at the bottom of the gulch, now brushed shoulders and eventually towered above heads. The plethora of native plants mixed with the moist, muddy earth gave a sweet, woody smell.
“People said it was a wasteland. But just look: the desert varnish is recovering,” Wegner said as he pointed to the sandstone walls, once bleached from the lake but now regaining orange and brown streaks.
“Vegetation is coming back,” he continued, as he gestured to the native grasses stabilizing the soil. “It’s not a wasteland. It’s valuable and important.”
Next to the reeds, an occasional old Pepsi can and folding beach chair peeked out from layers of sand and clay. The objects served as a reminder: not so long ago, this was underwater.
Frogs are seen within the first three miles into Davis Gulch.(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) A 1970s Pepsi can sits on the canyon floor in Davis Gulch on Saturday, April 25, 2026. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)
The Bureau of Reclamation began filling Lake Powell in 1963, flooding narrow canyons that were once so lush with cottonwood trees that John Wesley Powell named the area Glen Canyon. The reservoir kept climbing, swallowing shrines sacred to several tribes, including the Diné, Hopi, Pueblo and Paiute people.
“There’s thousands of years of prayers here,” said Daryl Vigil, co-director of the Water & Tribes Initiative and former water administrator for the Jicarilla Apache Nation.
It took nearly twenty years for Lake Powell to fill to 3,700 feet in elevation. It only stayed near that level for two decades before climate change-induced drought and overuse started shrinking the flows of the Colorado, San Juan and other rivers that feed the reservoir.
Now Lake Powell teeters on the brink of collapse: Forecasts show it could drop to its lowest level since filling and reach elevations at which Glen Canyon Dam was not designed to operate. That could threaten Reclamation’s ability to safely and reliably send water downstream to major cities and agricultural regions in Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico.
But environmental groups and scientists have found a silver lining to the Southwest’s water crisis: As Lake Powell recedes, the once-drowned Glen Canyon is surfacing and thriving ecosystems are emerging.
A fast moving skiff navigates the main channel of Lake Powell on Sunday, April 26, 2026, as bathtub rings are indicative of how far the waters levels have fallen since being at full capacity in the early 1980s. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)Eric Balken, Glen Canyon Institute executive director, lines up photos of Davis Gulch to show the before and after comparison of vegetation growth during a tour of side canyon tributaries at Lake Powell on Saturday, April 25, 2026. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)
“In Glen Canyon, that recovery is happening all on its own without human intervention,” said Eric Balken, director of Glen Canyon Institute. “I think that’s one of the most impressive things about this place, is that all of the recipes for ecological recovery are here. We just have to get out of the way.”
Dramatic changes
In late April, the Glen Canyon Institute and Returning Rapids Project, organizations that are documenting what’s emerging as the reservoir recedes, took 11 Colorado River advocates and a few journalists to witness Glen Canyon’s recovery.
“We’re in unprecedented times,” Mike DeHoff, a co-founder of the Returning Rapids Project and former river guide, told the group the night before they departed from Bullfrog Marina — a popular gateway to Lake Powell that was forced to relocate boats and docks to deeper water near Halls Crossing this spring.
Non-profit organizations that work on the Colorado River, come upon La Gorce arch in Davis Gulch as they see changes taking place in side canyon tributaries at Lake Powell on Saturday, April 25, 2026. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)
While the chirp of songbirds and sweet aroma of wildflowers awaited ahead, quicksand and sharp shells of invasive quagga mussels also loomed.
“Pay attention to your senses,” DeHoff said while describing the changing landscape ahead. “And don’t trust anything.”
The next morning, it took the group nearly three hours to motor across the reservoir in pontoons and aluminum skiffs to reach the Escalante River Arm, where smaller side canyons such as Davis Gulch have emerged. Even at near-record lows, the group was amazed by how vast the reservoir felt.
The journey across the blue expanse was familiar to Balken. He has taken over 50 trips to the newly formed streams and surfaced rock features around Powell since he started working for Glen Canyon Institute 20 years ago. He was 19 years old then, and the reservoir was 74 feet higher than it is today.
“I’ve seen really dramatic changes in the canyon,” he said.
The reservoir’s steep drop had become obvious. A stark line ran across the middle of towering sandstone walls where waves once lapped: the top half dark orange like a terracotta pot, the bottom half resembling a creamsicle.
In shallower spots, grey trunks and branches poked out like skeletons crawling out of the water. “Ghost trees,” Balken explained.
“You can only imagine what it would have been like with all these trees green and thriving,” he then said.
In some side canyons, though, imagination is no longer needed.
A pontoon boat motors down the main channel of Lake Powell.(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Once covered by water, drowned trees are seen in Davis Gulch during a tour of reemerging ecosystems in side canyon tributaries at Lake Powell on Saturday, April 25, 2026. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Eric Balken, Glen Canyon Institute executive director, talks about the changes he has seen in Davis Gulch during a tour of reemerging ecosystems in side canyon tributaries at Lake Powell on Saturday, April 25, 2026. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Fifteen years ago, the three miles of Davis Gulch that Balken led the group through in April were underwater. Some of the willows and cottonwoods that now line the gentle ribbon of water in the canyon have only been above Lake Powell for six years.
“In that short amount of time, they have recovered to such a great extent that we’re seeing diverse, functional ecosystems,” he said.
Tree canopies have formed. Purple-flowered American speedwell, long, green cattail grass and a variety of willows have filled the stream banks.
Those plants have created homes for insects, birds, frogs and larger wildlife. Balken counted 14 beaver dams in the three miles the group trekked. Others on the trip pointed out animal scat potentially left by otters, coyotes and cougars.
“It’s this huge natural laboratory for studying how ecosystems develop,” said Seth Arens, Utah Information Specialist with the Western Water Assessment, during an interview in May. “In some ways it’s this experiment on removing a dam without actually removing a dam.”
Davis Gulch, in Glen Canyon, is pictured in this photo match on Monday, May 17, 2021. Below, Eric Balken, Glen Canyon Institute executive director, revisits the site on Saturday, April 25, 2026, during a tour of the changes taking place in side canyon tributaries at Lake Powell. (Rick Egan (top) & Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)
‘A living, breathing thing’
Arens wasn’t on the trip in April, but his research was. While on the pontoon, Balken passed out a one-pager summarizing Arens’ and his co-authors’ upcoming paper on ecosystems emerging from Lake Powell.
In 2022, Arens set up plant surveys in 20 side canyons and began exploring two questions: What plants and ecosystems are establishing on landscapes previously flooded by Lake Powell? And how are those ecosystems changing over time?
About 100,000 acres of once-submerged land has surfaced since the reservoir was at its highest point in the 1980s, Arens said, including more than 180 miles of rivers and streams.
“[The] most surprising thing for me was just how quickly native ecosystems started regrowing along tributary creeks with flowing water some of the year,” he said. “There’s definitely a big difference between what happens on very dry landscapes and what happens on landscapes that are along or near a creek with flowing water.”
Native American speedwell creates a tapestry of color in Davis Gulch during a tour of side canyon tributaries at Lake Powell on Saturday, April 25, 2026. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)
In the first year or two after a landscape emerges from Lake Powell, it’s barren and devoid of life. “The original surface features of that canyon — the rocks, the boulders — all of those have been buried smooth with sediment,” Arens said.
In the smaller side canyons, anywhere from 10 to 70 feet of sand, clay and shale has been left in Lake Powell’s tracks, Arens said. In Cataract Canyon, where the main stem of the Colorado River runs, there’s closer to 200 feet of sediment.
Non-native plants like Russian thistle — or tumbleweed — first grow in the exposed landscape. But eventually, monsoonal rains dump into the canyons and form flash floods. The rushing water carves stream channels, and if water flows in the canyon year to year, native grasses and shrubs begin to thrive.
Davis Gulch is pictured during a tour of reemerging ecosystems in side canyon tributaries at Lake Powell on Saturday, April 25, 2026. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)
“By four to seven years, you’re starting to see a system that really resembles a system that was never flooded,” Arens said.
In areas that surfaced 25 years ago, Arens has documented cottonwoods that are 40 to 50 feet tall and over a foot in diameter. At that point, there’s typically not a difference between once drowned landscapes and areas above Powell’s high water line.
“It’s not a slick rock container for water anymore,” Arens said. “It’s a living, breathing thing. They’re vibrant, rich, native ecosystems that are growing in many locations. I think that needs to be considered, because it’s not the same situation as it was before.”
An opportunity to rethink management
A skiff travels under Gregory Natural Bridge, once completely submerged, in Fiftymile Canyon.(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Arens’ research is the first comprehensive survey of the returning vegetation in Glen Canyon.
“The park service has so much on their plate already in managing the changes in Glen Canyon that they have not yet had the resources to do these kinds of large scale ecological observations in the canyon,” Balken said.
The National Park Service manages emerging landscapes the same way it manages the rest of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, a park spokesperson said over email. “Ecologically, natural systems adjust as the shoreline changes, and we continue to monitor conditions to support those natural processes,” they wrote.
Because of the park service’s limited capacity, Balken said nonprofits, researchers and visitors to the area can fill the gaps in data collection. Glen Canyon Institute set up a “Glen Canyon Restoring Ecosystems Project” page on iNaturalist where people can upload their observations.
“This is all just brand new science, and I think we’re just barely starting to scratch the surface,” Balken said. “It’s exciting. This is a place that people wrote off a long time ago, and it was assumed that these canyons could never come back to life, and here they are.”
“It’s such a hopeful sign that nature can be resilient in the face of climate change and over consumption of water,” he added.
A great blue heron glides over the waters of Lake Powell as invasive quagga mussels cling to the sandstone on Saturday, April 25, 2026. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Balken and Arens said they hope land and water managers will consider Glen Canyon in future decisions.
Reclamation cites Arens’ research in its draft environmental impact statement that lays out future management alternatives for Lake Powell and Lake Mead. However, the returning ecosystem is mentioned in just a few paragraphs of the over 2,000-page document released in January.
“We have a second opportunity to potentially rethink how we manage this landscape,” Arens said.
“By no means is it the most important, or probably even cracking the top 100 of most important issues when it comes to water management,” he added. “However, it would be a mistake — it would be a tragedy — to see this issue just not considered at all in those decisions.”
A new generation
Non-profit organizations that work on the Colorado River tour Davis Gulch as they see changes taking place in side canyon tributaries at Lake Powell on Saturday, April 25, 2026. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)
The group’s three-mile journey up Davis Gulch ended at a small waterfall that gently flowed over two rounded sandstone benches. Tall cottonwoods grew around the pool that formed above the cascade, which was underwater 15 years ago.
“Now it’s this little, magical fern gully,” Balken said.
The group wove a path down the canyon, whacking through dense thickets of willows and trudging through knee-deep water pooled behind beaver dams.
“One of the worst things that could happen to Glen Canyon already happened,” Stutz said as she quickly stepped across sinking sediment.
The generation of Katie Lee, a singer and avid defender of Glen Canyon until her passing, were moved by what they lost, Stutz continued. But now, Stutz’s generation of twenty-somethings is motivated by what’s returning.
“We’re rewriting the narrative,” she said.
Invasive quagga mussels line the sandstone walls.(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)
As the group neared the border between land and lake, the buzz of insects quieted and the willows shrunk. A gust of wind shook the invasive quagga mussels lining the sandstone walls like a maraca.
“A quagga windchime,” Balken said.
Bird tracks covered the mud at the edge of the reservoir. The group loaded onto the pontoons, hugged by ghost trees. Now it was a bit easier for them to imagine what those gray branches once looked like, lush and green above water.
Note to readers • The Salt Lake Tribune traveled with Glen Canyon Institute as part of the reporting for this story. The Tribune paid for its share of costs related to travel and food on the trip, which was recorded as a donation to the organization.
This story was reported in partnership with the Colorado River Collaborative, with support from The Water Desk at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Morning sun strikes the powerhouse on the Nevada side of Hoover Dam. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)
Some day in the next 12 months – maybe in late-August, maybe not until next spring – Lake Mead will drop below the critical threshold of 1,035 feet above sea level.
That is the water-level elevation at which hydropower generating capacity at Hoover Dam, the largest in the Colorado River basin, will be cut by 70 percent. The drastic and immediate reduction in a cheap source of power that is responsive to hourly changes in electricity demand will have consequences for the region’s power customers and the broader electric grid alike.
Water managers have known for at least a year and a half that elevation 1,035 feet will be a problem for Hoover’s hydropower. Twelve of the dam’s 17 turbines are not designed to operate in low-water conditions that would be present when Mead is below that level. After record-low winter runoff into already-depleted reservoirs, water managers now know that the day of reckoning is coming soon.
“We’re going to go to 1,035,” Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, said at a meeting in mid-May. “There’s no question that’s going to happen.”
The Colorado River’s big reservoirs, Lakes Mead and Powell, are filled with trip wires – water-level elevations that, once breached, trigger a negative outcome. Both reservoirs are low enough that those trip wires for hydropower generation are in sight. With so little water in the system, water managers are in a triage situation, trying to minimize damage but acknowledging there will be unfortunate tradeoffs.
Some help is on the way. The Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the dams, announced on May 21 that it will spend $52 million on three new wide-head turbines that will be able to generate power down to elevation 950 feet.
“Unlocking these funds allows us to move forward with critical upgrades at one of the nation’s most important hydropower facilities,” saidScott Cameron, acting Reclamation commissioner, in a press release.
Once those turbines are installed and join the existing five wide-head units, the cut to generating capacity when Mead drops below 1,035 feet will be 58% – less, but still significant. Reclamation’s press office did not respond to questions about the installation timeline before publication.
Hoover Dam’s hydropower is in jeopardy because of problems upstream at Glen Canyon Dam, which forms Lake Powell. In April, the Bureau of Reclamation decided to reduce water releases out of Powell this year by 20%. That stop-gap decision was made to protect Glen Canyon’s fragile water-delivery infrastructure and to enable hydropower generation to continue. Without holding back water – and at the same time releasing more water from upstream reservoirs – Powell would have dropped below its hydropower trip wire by the end of the summer.
Hoover Dam annual electricity generation. (Geoff McGhee/The Water Desk)
Less water flowing out of Powell comes with an unfortunate side effect: the acceleration of Mead’s decline. Earlier this month, Mead was dropping roughly one foot every five days. It is now at 1,050 feet. At this rate, the 1,035 mark will be breached later this summer.
There is much uncertainty to that timeline, though. The lower basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada have proposed a conservation plan that might keep Mead above 1,035 until next spring. Mead’s rate of decline in the last week was a foot every five to seven days. The timing of the cliff depends on conservation, summer heat, and whatever moisture the summer monsoon brings.
That means a lot of watching and recalibrating, said Dane Bradfield, general manager of Lincoln County Power District, in eastern Nevada.
“It’s not a kick-back summer by any means,” he said.
Rising costs
Because his district has a contract for Hoover power, Bradfield is among those deep in the trenches. Hoover’s power customers are feeling the repercussions of declining hydropower generation.
Lincoln County Power District has more skin in the game than most. The district, which serves about 5,000 people in a county north of Las Vegas, gets about 70 percent of its electricity from Hoover.
The district forecasts power generation and demand. It then attempts to hedge against any shortfall with market contracts. Even with Hoover’s struggles, Bradfield said he is confident the district has secured enough power through 2026. He’s now looking ahead to 2027. Fortunately, market conditions are favorable right now.
“Our prices are somewhat low from what we’ve seen maybe a year or two ago, but it all changes so fast,” Bradfield said. “And that’s the volatility of the market and also the risk. But our plan right now is to make those purchases a year in advance and just be ready for when the bottom falls out of it.”
Eight turbines line the Nevada side of Hoover Dam’s powerhouse. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)
Lincoln County has also been acquiring solar power resources, which helped to cushion the hydropower shortfall that already occurred. Hoover’s output today is between 40% and 50% lower than it was in 2000, when Mead was full and Lincoln County received all of its power from Hoover.
Hydropower has traditionally been a cheap source of electricity. That might no longer be the case if Mead topples over the 1,035 cliff, cautions Jordy Fuentes, executive director of the Arizona Power Authority, which markets Arizona’s share of Hoover’s electricity.
The rate that Arizona customers pay for Hoover hydropower includes not only the cost of operations and maintenance at the dam but also visitor center operations, ecosystem protections, and repayment of the construction cost for the Central Arizona Project canal.
The consequences for the rate when generation drops amounts to basic math: less hydropower to sell means the price for each unit of electricity must increase to cover the fixed costs. Therefore, more expensive hydropower. Fuentes reckons the rate could triple, but the timing is uncertain.
“Will there be a lag in how they recover those costs?” Fuentes asks. “Or is there a period of time with a hole in the budget?”
Bradfield is having the same affordability conversations.
“We are anticipating that the cost of hydropower will probably go up,” he said. “And that’s another discussion that we’re having both internally and in the West is how much and when does that get to a point where that resource is priced out by other resources? Because typically hydropower has been the cheapest.”
Grid strain
Power customers are one area of concern. The other is the electricity grid itself.
Hydropower is valuable not just for the electricity it generates but also for maintaining a steady flow of power from source to home. Hydropower can respond almost instantly to changes in electricity demand, like those that happen in the early evening when air temperatures are hottest and people return from work to cook dinner, wash clothes, and recharge their gadgets. It is an extremely inexpensive way to provide ramping services to the grid, said Nathalie Voisin of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Voisin said the Colorado River emergency is demonstrating the opportunities for more joint management of water and energy resources.
“This doesn’t mean that the grid is going to go dark,” Voisin said. “It just means that other resources are being used to compensate for those services, and it’s just more expensive.”
Lake Mead, the largest reservoir on the Colorado River, is plunging, causing hydropower generation at Hoover Dam to decline. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)
A drastic decline in Hoover’s capacity will certainly have some grid effect. How large? That remains to be seen, said Katie Rogers, manager of reliability assessment for the Western Electricity Coordinating Council.
WECC is a regional organization tasked with keeping an eye on the grid in the western states. Its grid reliability assessments feed into the big national reports from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.
WECC’s 2026 summer outlook speaks in general terms about drought, extreme heat, wildfire, and diminished hydropower output. Those risks, individually or in concert, influence electricity availability and demand.
“We have to not just look at that one initial risk,” said Brian D’Agostino from San Diego Gas and Electric during a WECC webinar in early May. “We have to start looking at what happens when we combine two or three of these simultaneously and how do we prepare for that as a region.”
Rogers said that WECC is now collaborating with hydrologists and scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the National Laboratory of the Rockies to evaluate how grid operations would be affected by a drastic loss of capacity at Hoover. Their computer models allow them essentially to turn Hoover off and see how the grid responds under different weather, power generation, and electricity demand scenarios. Will the increase in large-scale battery storage offset a decline in Hoover’s ramping capability? Is a spring heat wave more problematic than a summer temperature spike?
“We do those ‘what if’ scenarios and your question is spot on – can the other areas of the grid compensate for what may be lost?” Rogers said. “And we don’t necessarily have answers to those questions, but those are the exact kinds of questions we try to get at.”
Those questions are timely – and, for the time being, timeless. A warming climate is reducing water availability in the Colorado River basin. These pressures on hydropower from low reservoir levels are not likely to let up.
“Absent some hydrology changes, the hydropower resource at both the upper basin and the lower basin is absolutely in trouble and directly related to drought,” Fuentes said.
This story was produced by Circle of Blue, in partnership with The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam near Page, Arizona, in May 2021. Photo by Ted Wood / The Water Desk.
This article originally appeared on June 2 on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Another warm, arid winter could leave Colorado River reservoirs nearly dry.
That is one of the projections a group of Colorado River experts released Monday, building on a previous report released last September assessing the future of the waterway’s federally managed dams under different hydrological scenarios. The new report forecasted the impacts of another dry winter and a wetter one, which it found would not provide enough water to extricate the basin from the depths of a climate change-fueled drought.
“Both scenarios demonstrate the need to adopt significant additional measures to permanently decrease consumptive uses across the entire Basin,” the authors wrote.
The Colorado River and its tributaries serve 40 million people across seven Western states, 30 tribal nations and Mexico. In the U.S., the Colorado River Basin is split into an upper basin containing Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, and a lower basin comprising Arizona, California and Nevada. Water use in the basins, between 11 and 13 million acre feet recently, has consistently outstripped what nature provides, leading to some reductions in usage but an imminent need for much steeper cuts.
But the new report finds the supply-and-demand imbalance is likely to persist under a range of weather and usage scenarios.
If water year 2027, measured from the beginning of October 2026 to the end of the following September, is similar to water year 2025, one of the five driest since 2000, and human consumption is on par with the lowest levels this century, the U.S. would overconsume the natural flow of the river by 2.59 million acre feet (one acre foot of water can serve between 1 and 3 households depending on the climate).
Such a drain would “risk a crash of the Basin’s water storage system,” the authors found.
Lakes Mead and Powell, the two largest reservoirs in the U.S., would hover just above the minimum elevations required for their dams to produce electricity and maintain their structural integrity. Hoover and Glen Canyon dams would be close to operating as “run-of-the-river” facilities that store no surplus.
Another dry winter would hit farmers across the region particularly hard, said Anne Castle, a senior fellow at the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School, a former assistant secretary for Water and Science at the Interior Department and one of the report’s authors. “It could put a lot of market pressure on agricultural water users” to sell their water to cities, she continued, which would “have a significant effect on agricultural production and rural communities.”
“It’s just so hard to make those kinds of deep cuts,” Castle said. “When you translate that into who exactly is going to get less water, it gets even harder.”
A wetter water year would bring only temporary relief. If next winter delivers large volumes of snow, akin to water year 2023, the third wettest year of the century, and human consumption matches what was drawn from the river that year, the Colorado River could provide a surplus of 4.83 million acre feet. This would partially recharge lakes Powell and Mead, but in less than two years overconsumption would return them to today’s lows, the authors wrote.
“By and large, their analysis is right—we need to reduce consumption,” said Mark Squillace, a natural resources law professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who was not involved with the report. “We need to be thinking about measuring consumptive use for our individual water users, and then making sure that we are finding strategies and providing incentives for users, particularly farmers, to reduce their consumptive use.”
As reservoir levels across the Colorado River Basin continue to drop, negotiations among the basin states over a new long-term operating plan for the Colorado River have pivoted toward a short-term deal. There is a real possibility that states will sue one another over how much water each will be required to leave in the river for the others to use, an outcome widely seen as counterproductive. The Bureau of Reclamation, which manages federal infrastructure throughout the basin, including Hoover and Glen Canyon dams, is expected to publish its record of decision this summer detailing how it will operate the river moving forward.
“There is concern that because the seven states haven’t been able to come to a consensus agreement and because Reclamation’s and Interior’s authorities are limited, the operation we’ll see described is potentially not going to be sufficient to stabilize the system,” Castle said.
The new report’s hydrological forecasts show less water in the river than Reclamation’s Mayiteration of its 24-month projections, which are based on river flow measurements from 1991 to 2020. Given the recent drought, Castle called the agency’s minimum probable inflow forecast for the water year 2027 “way high.”
“The 1990s were relatively wet,” said Eric Kuhn, the retired general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, the oldest and largest of the state’s four conservation districts, and another of the report’s authors. “Since 2020, we’ve had about a 10 million acre-foot river.”
Reclamation did not respond to a request for comment about how it factors aridity into its 24-month projections. The agency also makes other 2-year and 5-year projections for the river using its Mid-Term Operations Model, which Kuhn said encompasses the continued drought of the last half-decade.
“Reclamation is on their toes when it comes to improving these forecasts,” Kuhn said.
No matter what the next water year brings, Colorado River reservoirs will likely continue ratcheting downward as long as supply and demand remain imbalanced. “Every time we go through a wet period, we don’t recover enough and we haven’t reduced basic uses enough,” Kuhn said. “The next dry cycle is worse.”
“This is not a temporary situation,” he continued. “The long-term solution is a permanent reduction in the consumptive use footprint throughout the basin.”
Squillace agreed, and added that as climate change promises to upend how water is managed in the arid West, that basin cannot afford to get hung up on a short-term agreement. “That’s just kicking the can down the road,” he said.
The hydrology is “gonna get worse,” he continued. “So let’s plan for that.”
Wind-sculpted snow at Utah’s Alta Ski Area in 2016. Researchers used hand-collected data from the Wasatch Mountains and elsewhere to train computer models to forecast snowfall density, a key driver of winter storm hazards. Photo: Mitch Tobin / The Water Desk.
Sometimes snow is light, fluffy and easy to shovel. Skiers and snowboarders crave this kind of fresh powder and may call it “blower.” You can scoop some up in your glove and blow it into the wind like dust.
At other times, snow is thick, heavy and backbreaking to remove from a sidewalk or driveway. These storms may be great for making snowballs, but on ski slopes near the West Coast, the dense snow is known derisively as “Sierra cement” or “Cascade concrete.”
The factor that explains the difference is a metric known as the snow-to-liquid ratio, or SLR, which compares the depth of freshly fallen snow with the amount of liquid water it would produce if melted.
Forecasters have long struggled to predict SLR because it depends on a complex mix of atmospheric conditions, including temperature, humidity and wind. Yet SLR shapes how snowstorms affect road safety and avalanche danger, making better forecasts potential lifesavers. SLR also impacts winter recreation and the distribution of snow across the West’s watersheds, where many basins experienced a record-low snowpack this winter.
Now, scientists are using machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to better forecast SLR and the resulting snowfall totals. To train their computer models, researchers relied on snow data collected the old-fashioned way: by hand.
“For a good snowfall forecast from weather prediction models, you need a good snow-to-liquid ratio forecast,” said Peter Veals, a research assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Utah. He described SLR as “a really ripe thing to tackle” and “a huge source of error in snowfall forecasts in the West.”
A common rule of thumb assumes that 1 inch of water produces 10 inches of snow—an SLR of 10-to-1. In reality, each inch of liquid precipitation may yield far more—or far less—than 10 inches of snow. One 2003 study said the SLR of freshly fallen snow “can vary from on the order of 3:1 to (occasionally) 100:1.”
“This issue of snow-to-liquid ratio is an interesting one because it’s maybe the most difficult thing to actually measure and forecast correctly when it comes to snow,” said Russ Schumacher, Colorado state climatologist and a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University. “Usually, what our weather prediction models predict is the amount of precipitation—the liquid—but then if you want the inches of snow that is falling, you need the SLR.”
Two recent scientific studies found that machine learning—a technique with roots in the 1950s—could improve SLR predictions and provide better answers to the age-old question people ask before every storm: How much is it going to snow?
The two studies shared some co-authors, and both used machine learning to better predict SLR, but the papers examined different geographies and relied on different data sources.
One study, published online in August 2025 in Weather and Forecasting, focused on mountains in the West. This paper was based on high-quality data collected manually at 14 sites, primarily by avalanche professionals working for transportation departments or ski resorts.
White dots mark the 14 locations where snow professionals manually measured fresh snow and its water content for a study of SLR in the American West. Source: Veals et al. (2025).
The study found that machine learning predicted SLR with “considerably more skill” than existing approaches, even when the models used only “a simple combination of wind speed and temperature.” When trained on a more extensive set of atmospheric variables, forecast skill improved further.
“The algorithms built in this paper can drastically improve SLR prediction over the mountains of the western United States,” the authors wrote.
The second study, published online in January 2026 in Weather and Forecasting, examined SLR across the contiguous United States, not just the mountainous West. The authors found that their machine-learning method “outperforms existing methods” used by the National Weather Service.
“The neat thing about it is, as long as you get the proper equipment and you receive the proper training, anybody can do this, so we thought that was pretty cool,” said Michael Pletcher, a data scientist at Flash Weather AI who recently completed his Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah. He was lead author of the national study and a co-author of the Western mountain paper.
Protecting the public with better snow forecasts
More accurate snowfall forecasts would not only satisfy public curiosity and help skiers plan powder days. They could also save the lives of motorists and backcountry travelers because SLR affects road conditions and avalanche danger.
“Winter storms are among the costliest natural disasters in the U.S. and are responsible for upwards of a thousand deaths during aviation and vehicle accidents during winter storms each year,” Pletcher said. “Our hope for this research was to just generally improve forecasts of snowfall so that we could hopefully reduce financial and human-related losses during these winter storms.”
Both studies used advanced computing power, but they relied on old-school, hand-collected snow measurements because automated gauges can struggle to measure snowfall accurately. The insights gleaned from machine learning now help inform forecasting products available to meteorologists across the nation.
“This will directly improve everyone in America’s snowfall forecast by a small amount,” said Veals, who was lead author of the Western study and co-author on the national paper.
Bart Geerts, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science at the University of Wyoming who wasn’t involved in the studies, called the machine-learning research a “great, somewhat novel way of thinking about snow.”
“What is new here is really the ability to predict SLR based on ambient environmental conditions. When I say environmental, I mean the atmosphere at the location or in a broader region, and that includes the cloud conditions, the cloud properties,” Geerts said.
Schumacher, who also wasn’t an author of the papers, described the recent research as a “pretty big step forward” beyond current methods.
“It’s been a longstanding challenge, a variable that’s been challenging to predict, and they’ve made a huge amount of progress here by collecting the right datasets, by using modern methods, and thinking about the applications,” Schumacher said.
The SLR studies are examples of a growing trend in meteorology: harnessing AI to make better predictions of snowfall and other weather.
“AI and machine learning is having all sorts of big advances in weather forecasting, and really they’ve come really quickly over the last five years or so,” Schumacher said. “We have now a whole suite of different models that are making weather predictions out to two weeks that are driven essentially entirely by AI algorithms. At least for the large-scale weather patterns, they’re competitive with—if not better than—the traditional weather prediction models.”
Researcher Peter Veals measures snowfall at a study site in Utah. Source: University of Utah.
Why SLR is tricky to predict
SLR lies at the heart of snowfall forecasts and winter storm impacts, but it varies so much from storm to storm and from place to place that the rough estimate of 10-to-1 is often far from reality.
The origin of the 10-to-1 ratio is likely a 1965 study that used 19th-century snow density data from Toronto, Canada, according to a 2000 paper. An average SLR of 13 would actually be more appropriate for much of the contiguous United States, a 2005 study concluded.
A major obstacle to studying SLR is the lack of high-quality data on the depth and water content of fresh snow—the two measurements needed to calculate the ratio.
“It’s a challenge to predict, in part, because it’s a challenge to observe,” said Jim Steenburgh, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah and author of “Secrets of the Greatest Snow on Earth.” Steenburgh was a co-author of both machine-learning papers.
In his book, Steenburgh highlights Utah’s Alta ski area as a hotspot for light powder, but he said SLR at the resort in the Wasatch Range can vary dramatically, from 3-to-1 or 4-to-1 on the low end, up to 40-to-1 in extreme events.
“That’s a factor of 10 difference, and you can just imagine how that affects the snowfall forecast—it’s by a pretty big amount,” Steenburgh said. “Other parts of the country, the variability is not that large, but it still can be pretty substantial, so it’s an important part of the forecast equation.”
Alta’s powder is legendary, but other Western ski areas also boast about their low-density snow. Montana’s Bridger Bowl markets the “cold smoke” that riders stir up, while Colorado’s Steamboat Ski Resort has trademarked Champagne Powder® to describe its high-SLR snow.
“Your light, perfect Colorado or Utah powder that people go nuts for is typically anything with an SLR greater than 20,” Veals said. “That’s a good benchmark for the kind of snow that people really lose their minds over and wait for four hours in traffic for.”
The top map shows average SLR from October to April, with higher levels found in parts of the Interior West and around the Great Lakes. The bottom map shows average October-April snowfall in centimeters. Source: Pletcher et al. (2026).
The “habit” of ice crystals
SLR is hard to predict because snow crystals can form in many shapes and sizes, depending on atmospheric conditions.
“Winter storm forecasting is really hard,” Steenburgh said. “I look at winter storm forecasting as kind of a grand challenge for our field.”
Nearly a century ago, Japanese scientist Ukichiro Nakaya helped pioneer the study of snowflakes by creating artificial ice crystals in a laboratory and studying how changes in temperature and humidity influenced their shapes. Nakaya likened snowflakes to letters from the heavens because they revealed conditions in the clouds where they formed.
“Ultimately, the density of the snow on the ground depends on what we call the crystal habit—that’s the shape of the snow crystals,” Steenburgh said. “What makes it really hard is ice crystals form at different elevations in the storm. They experience different pathways as they fall. And so it’s a really complicated problem when you look at it on a very microscopic level.”
Some clouds produce the iconic six-armed dendrites that have come to symbolize snowflakes. At other times, storms produce more humble forms such as needles, columns, plates and prisms. If enough supercooled liquid droplets freeze onto falling snow crystals—a process known as riming—the result can be graupel, which looks like tiny Styrofoam beads.
“Typically, dendrites will result in high-SLR or low-density snows because when those ice crystals settle on the ground, then there’s a lot of pore space in between them,” Pletcher said. Other types of ice crystal habits pack more closely together and yield higher-density snow.
“The temperature, the moisture, the wind speed, is what influences the crystal habit, which is what then influences the snow-to-liquid ratio on the ground,” Pletcher said.
If conditions are right, clouds can produce the ornate, delicate dendrites adored by skiers and other snow lovers, but a lot can happen to a snowflake as it falls to earth. The wind can break elegant ice crystals into fragments that pack more tightly on the ground.
Snow comes in many forms. This diagram shows how temperature and humidity inside clouds influence the growth of ice crystals. Source: Kenneth Libbrecht, snowcrystals.com.
Colder conditions are often associated with lower-density snow, which helps explain why snowfall closer to the coast tends to be denser than snow in the interior West. But Veals said one of the biggest myths about SLR is that cold temperatures automatically produce light, fluffy snow. In reality, “our research shows if you have really high wind speeds and you get a lot of snowfall, it’s actually going to densify quite a bit,” Veals said.
“The single biggest influence on snow-to-liquid ratio is the total amount of water you have in your snowfall that day because it compacts under its own weight,” Veals said. “Basically, the more snow you have, the more it will densify itself.”
Frigid temperatures can also inhibit the formation of the dendrites associated with blower conditions, cold smoke and Champagne Powder®.
“Once you get to really, really cold temperatures,” Veals said, “your snow actually starts getting more dense with decreasing temperature because you stop producing these dendrites, which are like the star-shaped crystals we’re used to seeing, and you start producing other types of crystals like plates or needles that stack really more densely together.”
If snowflakes are like letters from the heavens, the machine-learning approach offers a new way to read the handwriting in the clouds.
Deciphering those messages from the sky—and predicting ice-crystal habits—is especially difficult in the mountains, where topography exerts such a strong influence on the weather. Yet many existing SLR algorithms “were trained using observations mostly or completely from nonmountainous regions,” according to the 2025 study.
“It’s not even just the SLR,” Pletcher said. “Just forecasting the liquid amount of precipitation that’s going to come out of these storms over complex terrain is incredibly challenging.”
Temperatures and precipitation depend heavily on elevation. Winds are steered, lifted and disrupted by the rugged landscape. But the geographic resolution of weather models may be too coarse to capture the stark differences between ridges and valleys.
One widely used model—NOAA’s High-Resolution Rapid Refresh—divides the landscape into a grid of squares with 3-kilometer (1.9-mile) edges, so each pixel must describe weather conditions over 2,224 acres.
“You think of some of the sharp topography of the West, you could fit a mountain in there that’s got anywhere from 7,000 feet of elevation to 13,000 feet of elevation in a grid box like that,” Veals said. “You could have anywhere from really cold temperatures up at the highest peak that’s in that grid box, and then you could have really warm, dense snow falling down below, and it’s all going to be averaged into that pixel.”
Measuring snowfall by hand
The two studies used advanced computing power to train machines to recognize patterns in atmospheric conditions that shape ice crystals and snow density. But the snowfall data they relied on wasn’t collected by automated gauges, satellites or other high-tech instruments—it was painstakingly measured by hand.
A major barrier to studying SLR is that automated weather gauges can struggle to accurately measure the two key ingredients: the depth of newly fallen snow and its water content. As a result, calculating SLR can be like “dividing unknown chaos by unknown chaos,” Veals said.
“We wanted to focus on high-quality datasets because for any machine-learning model, they can only make predictions as good as the data that they’re trained on,” Pletcher said. “If either study were to have incorporated automated gauges, those are susceptible to a phenomenon called undercatch, where they don’t reliably report the amount of liquid precipitation captured in the gauge. Air can flow over the instrument, and it kind of blows the rain or snow away from the gauge, and so it underreports the amount of precipitation.”
Wind speed is a major driver of undercatch.
“For zero wind—completely calm—it will probably catch almost 100% of the snow that fell. But as the wind speed picks up, you could get down to 50% or less,” Veals said.
For the 2025 study of the West’s mountains, the scientists relied on professionals with extensive experience measuring snow, but the dataset covered only 14 sites. For the 2026 national study, the researchers turned to the CoCoRaHS network of volunteer observers. (You can apply to join CoCoRaHS online.)
Researchers sent a survey to CoCoRaHS volunteers to screen the observations and improve the data quality. The scientists only included measurements from observers who recorded the depth of new snowfall on a board and determined its water content by melting the snow or weighing it on a scale. Of the 1,182 sites that responded to the survey, 921 were included in the study.
“The big advantage of something like CoCoRaHS with the volunteer observers is strength in numbers. You get a lot more observations than what you can get in a lot of other environments,” Schumacher said. “The potential downside is while the observers are trained, to some extent, they’re not doing this as their job or as sort of professionals in the field necessarily.”
Schumacher was not a co-author of either study, but the CoCoRaHS headquarters is located at the Colorado Climate Center, which he directs, and Schumacher helped connect Veals to CoCoRaHS.
CoCoRaHS volunteers may be amateurs, but their ranks include current and former meteorologists and atmospheric scientists, Veals said.
“The thing that always impresses me is how diligent and careful a lot of the observers are,” Schumacher said. “In the study, they sent out a survey to try and find the observers who actually are making the measurements the right way. And so I think that helps mitigate some of those limitations of measurements that might be of less quality or more questionable quality.”
While the hands-on approach can yield more accurate SLR data than automated gauges, it’s not without its hurdles.
“If you take the measurement after the snow’s been settling for a while, then you get a different snow-to-liquid ratio than if you took it sort of right away after the snow ended,” Schumacher said.
CoCoRaHS recommends using a 16-inch-square white board to measure snow depth, but wind can scatter snow unevenly across the board.
“If there’s drifting on the board, it’s hard to know what you want to call the actual measurement of snow on the board, so those aren’t perfect either,” Veals said. “But they’re by far the best way of measuring snow, is just a person taking a core and weighing it with a little scale.”
Ultimately, every approach to measurement has limitations because snow is constantly changing as it settles, drifts and melts.
“We have a saying in atmospheric sciences,” Steenburgh said. “All observations are bad, but some are useful. Every observation has uncertainty with it, and it has error with it.”
A CoCoRaHS map shows 24-hour snowfall reports from volunteer observers across Colorado on May 6, 2026. Source: CoCoRaHS.
Better forecasts for roads and avalanches
The machine-learning research has led to the creation of forecast tools available to the public through the University of Utah’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences.
“The practical implications of these products is they’re widely used by meteorologists across the United States” at National Weather Service offices, Pletcher said. “They’re also used by avalanche forecasters and just by the general public to gauge how to better prepare for impending winter storms.”
Schumacher said the SLR papers avoided the so-called “valley of death” that often separates scientific research from day-to-day forecasting.
“In this case, they’ve done the work to also make it useful more broadly than just among researchers or just among technical specialists,” Schumacher said.
Better SLR forecasts could help transportation officials navigate treacherous storms that clog roadways and generate dangerous whiteout conditions.
“The snow removal piece is a big part of it because that’s a huge factor in how easy or how difficult it is to be plowing the snow off of roads,” Schumacher said. “The lighter snow, if it’s windy, is more likely to turn into blowing snow, which in some places that can be very hazardous.”
While snowfall benefits the West’s water supply and snow sports industry, winter storms can be deadly for motorists and other travelers.
According to a 2015 study, winter precipitation was a factor in nearly 28,000 aviation and motor vehicle accidents between 1975 and 2011, resulting in more than 32,000 fatalities—an average of nearly 900 per year. “Fatality totals from winter-precipitation-related vehicle accidents far eclipse fatality totals from other, more prominent weather hazards, such as tornadoes, flooding, and hurricanes,” the researchers wrote.
A potent April snowstorm along Colorado’s Continental Divide provided a stark example of the perils: between 60 and 70 vehicles were involved in a massive pileup on icy I-70 as drivers faced limited visibility due to whiteout conditions.
Avalanches are another realm in which snowfall can have life-or-death consequences. SLR is of keen interest to avalanche forecasters because it can influence the snowpack’s structure and stability.
“How that snow-to-liquid ratio changes during a storm can strongly affect avalanche conditions,” Steenburgh said. Storms in which SLR decreases over time—piling higher-density snow over lower-density snow—are generally more dangerous for avalanches. “We call those upside-down storms rather than right-side up,” Steenburgh said.
In the 2025-26 season, 23 people have died in U.S. avalanches, including nine in a February incident near Lake Tahoe, according to Avalanche.org, a partnership between the American Avalanche Association and the U.S. Forest Service National Avalanche Center. During the prior 10 seasons, avalanches claimed an average of about two dozen lives per year in the United States, according to data from the Colorado Avalanche Information Center.
Avalanches, road closures, traffic accidents—and the quality of a skier’s powder day—can all hinge on snow’s shape-shifting nature and what happens to flakes as they fall from the sky.
“Snow is a really remarkable substance. It comes in all kinds of different forms, and sometimes those forms really do matter for societal impacts,” Steenburgh said.
During an April snowstorm, a pileup on Colorado’s I-70 near the Continental Divide involved 60 to 70 vehicles. Photo: Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Office.
Water, warming and snow density
Hydrologists focus less on SLR and more on how much water is stored in the snowpack—what’s known as the snow water equivalent. SWE (pronounced “swee”) is the depth of the liquid you’d get by melting a column of snow. If a storm drops the equivalent of 1 inch of water, a low SLR could yield a few inches of snow, while a high SLR could produce a couple of feet—but when melted, either would still produce an inch of liquid water.
“From the perspective of a hydrologist, the SLR is less important directly,” Geerts said, “yet the driver there, the snow distribution across the terrain, is impacted by SLR.”
Lower-density snow with a high SLR is more susceptible to being blown around, and “strong wind events will carry that fluffy snow across watershed boundaries,” Geerts said. “So from that perspective, it does matter for hydrologists.”
While SLR could influence which watershed snow winds up in, “that’s a pretty small-scale effect,” Steenburgh said. “If you’re looking at the entire Colorado [River] Basin, that’s not going to matter too much.”
Climate change is already transforming the West’s snowpack, as warmer temperatures shift more precipitation from snow to rain and shorten the snow season. Neither SLR study examined climate change effects, but scientists said higher temperatures are generally expected to make snowfall denser on average.
“We haven’t looked specifically at the change in SLR over time because our SLR datasets don’t extend far enough back,” Veals said. “But because we found these strong linkages between temperature and SLR, we can expect that in a warming climate, the snow is going to get more dense, so there will be an increase in the average density of the snow.”
There is already data showing that snow densities are increasing and SLR is declining, but “not dramatically,” Steenburgh said.
“It’s not like Alta is going from the greatest snow on earth to Sierra cement or Cascade concrete. But there is a shift, for example, to higher-density snow, and we’re seeing more higher-density snow events. So I think in the continental United States, that’s something that I would expect to see more of,” Steenburgh said. “The hard part is really nailing down exactly what that trend is, just because the observations are so difficult to do.”
AI revolution in weather forecasting
The machine learning used in the SLR studies is part of today’s AI boom, but the technique itself is hardly new.
“Machine learning is basically a more specialized version of statistics,” Pletcher said.
In a seminal 1959 study, “Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers,” IBM scientist Arthur L. Samuel reported that “a computer can be programmed so that it will learn to play a better game of checkers than can be played by the person who wrote the program.”
“I like to tell people that machine learning has been around for a long time,” Steenburgh said. “Meteorologists have been using statistical methods to improve computer forecast models since really the late 1950s. What’s changing now is the ability to do real deep learning using enormous datasets.”
Machine learning excels at spotting patterns in data and using them to make predictions about how similar conditions will play out in the future.
“You give it all these situations and say, ‘For all these different snowfall events, these were the temperatures and the humidities and wind speeds that were observed, and take all that into account, know that, and then the next time we give you a wind speed and a temperature and a humidity, tell us what the snow-to-liquid ratio is going to be,’” Veals said. “That’s what machine learning does really, really well, and that’s why it’s revolutionized a lot of things in the weather and climate space.”
While machine learning is not new, successful applications still depend on high-quality training data and humans who understand the subject matter—what scientists often call “domain knowledge.”
“We know snow. We understand the measurement issues. We know how to build forecast systems,” Steenburgh said.
The recent SLR studies are part of a wave of AI applications in weather forecasting, with researchers using the approach to predict everything from large-scale weather patterns to local snowfall.
“I think it’s definitely the most transformative period of weather prediction of my entire career,” Steenburgh said. “Things are happening really fast.”
Traditionally, weather models have relied on powerful computers to simulate the ever-evolving atmosphere, using complex physics equations to predict conditions on the ground.
Some AI-based forecasting systems have taken a very different path, Veals said. Instead, they’ve “gone back to the drawing board and just said, ‘Let’s feed in just past weather maps and have these AI models predict what the map will be in 10 days or whatever as the forecast.’ And so that’s the big revolution that’s going on right now.”
Even with better SLR forecasts, scientists said snowfall will remain tough to predict, especially in the mountains, because it varies so widely over short distances and is shaped by complex atmospheric dynamics within clouds. But machine learning and other AI technologies are giving researchers new ways to probe a substance that has fascinated—and confounded—people for ages.
“It’s definitely a really exciting time to be an atmospheric scientist at the intersection of data science and meteorology, and specifically for winter weather,” Pletcher said. “Machine learning is great because it’s allowing atmospheric scientists to really push the boundaries of not only improving snowfall prediction, but just weather prediction in general.”
Aerial view of the snowpack in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains on May 13, 2026. Even with better tools for predicting SLR, snowfall remains difficult to forecast in mountainous terrain, where conditions can change sharply over short distances. Photo: Mitch Tobin / The Water Desk.
This story was produced by The Water Desk, an independent journalism program at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Bill Adams leans against a concrete dock anchor on a cliff overlooking the Bullfrog Marina, April 27, 2026. Adams has seen Lake Powell change a lot in the five decades he’s been visiting Bullfrog. (David Condos, KUER)KUER’s David Condos reports from Lake Powell
For Dave and Gaye Babcock, Lake Powell is like part of the family.
The couple from Helper, Utah, have been coming for nearly 50 years. They got engaged at the lake. His daughter’s wedding was right here at Bullfrog Bay.
“We’ve had a lot of good memories here,” Dave Babcock said. “I hope they can keep us coming back.”
As the West’s historically dry, warm winter continues to shrink the nation’s second-largest reservoir, those memories may be fading into the past.
Lake Powell’s water levels are forecast to drop to new record lows. That’s bad news for 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River for water and power. It’s changing recreation, too.
“I’m shocked,” Gaye Babcock said as she pointed across the expanse of orange desert next to the lake. “This whole flat was covered with water, and to see it now, I wouldn’t even believe that we’re at the same place.”
In a gravel parking lot near the water’s edge, Dave walked around their new motorboat, the La Lorraine, doing some last-minute prep before a day of fishing. The couple had been thinking about visiting Powell later this year, but he decided not to wait. The lake has already dropped to the lowest reaches of Bullfrog’s only open boat ramp, and the forecast for spring runoff is bleak.
“I’m not sure we can put a boat in this fall here. It’s kind of that simple,” he said. “We thought we better go get it wet before we can’t put it in Lake Powell — or Lake Puddle, as we was calling it this morning.”
Lake Powell’s dire water level forecast is prompting an unprecedented move: transporting the massive Bullfrog Marina to deeper waters. (David Condos, KUER)
The Babcocks aren’t the only ones adjusting to the lake’s new reality.
The Bullfrog Marina — a massive floating dock with hundreds of houseboats stored in its slips — is now being moved to deeper waters on the lake’s south side.
“It’s an engineering feat that hasn’t been done in this capacity,” said Robert Knowlton, regional vice president with Aramark, the concessionaire that runs the marina. “Probably not in my lifetime, that I’m aware of.”
But desperate times call for desperate measures. If the marina doesn’t move, Knowlton said the whole thing would likely be sitting on dry ground by July.
Barges will push the marina and its boats across the lake to Halls Crossing — a 2.5-hour drive by car. Knowlton expects the move to be completed by mid-June, with a small boat to shuttle people from Bullfrog.
There’s still a lot of water in Powell, he said, it’s just a matter of finding ways for people to get out to it. And his company’s committed to keeping the Bullfrog side of the lake alive.
A boat navigates away from the main houseboat slip area at Bullfrog Marina in the final days before it’s moved to Halls Crossing, April 28, 2026. (David Condos, KUER)
“We’re putting, I mean, exorbitant amounts of time and money to do this,” he said. “This is not a short-term goal for us.”
The idea is to eventually return the marina to Powell’s north side near a deeper ramp that’s planned along the lake’s main channel at Stanton Creek, just south of Bullfrog. The National Park Service estimates the ramp project will cost $73.4 million and allow access to the water even at an elevation of 3,500 feet — roughly 25 feet below current lake levels.
It’ll likely be a couple of years before the ramp is completed and the marina is moved back, Knowlton said.
In the meantime, the park service is building a primitive ramp, essentially extending the main Bullfrog launch that’s closed due to low water. That would allow boats to continue accessing the lake even after the water drops beyond the reach of Bullfrog’s north ramp. Knowlton anticipates the primitive ramp will open this summer.
He’s hopeful the recently announced water releases from Flaming Gorge reservoir “slows the bleeding” — preventing Powell from getting much lower this summer. And for those who do get out on the lake, he said, the receding waters have revealed new caves and arches that have been submerged for years.
“They can come see parts of the lake that have never been explored before,” he said. “It’s not all negative.”
Crews move red dirt as part of a primitive ramp project to extend boat access in Bullfrog Bay, April 28, 2026. (David Condos, KUER)
Along the lonely desert highway to Bullfrog, the only visitor services are clustered around Ticaboo, a tiny community of around 70 homes.
“Traffic to the lake is definitely a huge economic impact on Ticaboo and our businesses here,” said Michael Palmquist, director of outdoor recreation at North Lake Powell Adventures.
He’s worried social media posts sensationalizing the lake’s dire situation may scare some visitors off. But as long as boats can get in the water, he said, they will.
“I think the people that know Lake Powell are still going to come down. They’re still going to enjoy it, just as they always have.”
Even the marina’s move isn’t all bad news, he said. It means one less competitor for his company, which also rents and services watercraft. Over the past decade, his team has also started offering UTV rentals and off-road tours, diversifying its business into non-aquatic activities.
“That’s the silver lining for us,” he said, “is that we’re able to offer more than just the lake.”
Some long-time visitors have found silver linings in Lake Powell’s dry year, too.
A houseboat sits in dry storage near Ticaboo, Utah, April 28, 2026. (David Condos, KUER)
Salt Lake City resident Bill Adams has been boating here since the 1970s and was planning to get his pontoon out this spring. But he had some trouble with the boat storage.
The storage office is part of the floating marina, Adams said, and he had a hard time reaching them because the lake dropped so low into the canyon that they lost cell phone signal.
So, he was forced to rethink his Lake Powell vacation.
“I don’t see it as bad,” Adams said with a laugh. “I see it as inconvenient, but not necessarily bad.”
Rather than getting out on the water, he and his son enjoyed several hikes through red rock badlands that border the lake. And exploring the dry side of Bullfrog has given him a different perspective on a place he’s known for decades.
“We always sort of want things to be the same. But they never are,” Adams said. “If you can’t live with change, you can’t be happy, because everything changes.”
As this parched year makes it even harder to keep Lake Powell the way it was, he said that may be a lesson for us all.
