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.
Lake Powell is formed by Glen Canyon Dam. In a concept pitched by a conservation organization, a flexible pool of water could be moved between Upper Basin reservoirs to wherever it’s needed most. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
This story was originally published by Aspen Journalism on May 12, 2026
An environmental organization is floating a concept that could help the Colorado River system during extremely dry years like this one and keep the nation’s two largest reservoirs above critical thresholds.
Boulder-based Western Resource Advocates has released a concept paper that explores the idea of a flexible pool of water that can be moved wherever it’s needed most among the basin’s biggest reservoirs.
Water users in the Lower Basin states — California, Arizona and Nevada — currently have about 3.2 million acre-feet stored in Lake Mead through voluntary conservation and efficiency measures. Water users bank water in this pool, known as the Intentionally Created Surplus, and can take this water back out again to use under certain circumstances.
The paper’s authors — John Berggren, a regional policy manager with Western Resource Advocates, and Kevin Wheeler, principal and engineer with Water Balance Consulting — used the ICS pool as an example to explore how the idea would work. They say that if the ICS pool could be moved from Lake Mead to Lake Powell, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation could have a buffer to more easily protect Glen Canyon Dam infrastructure, minimize the need for large releases from upstream reservoirs and reduce the risk of litigation among the seven basin states that share the Colorado River.
“If you took a million or two million acre-feet out of Mead in the form of a conservation pool and moved it to Powell, then you could protect Powell without having to do all the DROA and the 6e releases,” Berggren said. “This is a perfect year where we would like to have the flexibility to move this water wherever it’s needed most, in this case in Powell.”
Berggren is referring to the actions that the federal government is taking this year: releasing up to 1 million acre-feet from Flaming Gorge Reservoir to prop up Powell, as well as reducing releases down to just 6 million acre-feet from Powell instead of the originally expected 7.48 million acre-feet. Projections from Reclamation show the reservoir falling below 3,500 feet by this summer if these actions aren’t taken, jeopardizing the ability to make hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam.
This is a pivotal moment for the Colorado River Basin’s 40 million water users, with a historically bad snowpack and streamflows pushing reservoir levels to new lows and management into crisis mode. The seven states that share the river have not been able to reach an agreement for how reservoirs will be operated and shortages will be shared after the current framework expires this year. The feds are poised to step in with their own management rules, but the actions they are allowed to legally take may not go far enough to keep the system from crashing.
Berggren’s paper lays out a surplus pool that would be flexible and “operationally neutral,” and would be separate from the rest of the stored water in both reservoirs. That means it wouldn’t count toward calculations of how much water is in Lake Powell or Lake Mead for the purpose of determining how water shortages would be shared.
There isn’t a way to physically move water upstream, but according to WRA, water could be transferred between reservoirs through adjustments to dam releases and careful accounting. A pool could be “moved” from Mead to Powell by holding back water in Powell. It could be moved back to Mead by increasing releases from Powell.
The concept paper does not advocate for taking such actions this year, presenting them as a potential strategy to be used under a new river management framework that is being hashed out between the states that share the river and the federal government.
“There are a lot of concerns about operational neutrality, but we’re trying to show that it’s actually not that scary and can provide benefit with less risk than the current options,” Berggren said.
Reservoir levels in Mead currently determine how deep cuts to the Lower Basin states are; as Mead is drawn down, it triggers deeper cuts. Some water experts have said the ICS pool allows Lower Basin water users to game the system. By leaving their water in the ICS pool, it keeps reservoir levels artificially high and lets water users avoid taking deeper cuts. If the ICS pool had remained separate from the rest of Lake Mead, shortage triggers and mandatory conservation would have happened earlier.
Making this pool “operationally neutral,” or invisible to reservoir operations, fixes this issue.
In a proposal submitted to the federal government May 1, the Lower Basin states expressed support for this concept, but they did not lay out a plan to implement it.
“The goal is to achieve operational neutrality of ICS,” the submittal reads. “The Lower Division States will continue to determine when and how to convert ICS to operational neutrality at higher elevations in Lake Mead.”
They also said the long-term goal is to create an operationally neutral common pool of new water savings to be strategically deployed at low elevations to help delay and offset additional reductions to the Lower Basin.
Some experts say there are concerns and unanswered questions about these types of pools. The dividing line where water delivery is measured from the Upper Basin (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) to the Lower Basin is Lee Ferry, just downstream of Lake Powell. Water measured at this location determines whether the Upper Basin remains in compliance with the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Moving water between reservoirs would have to deal with this issue.
“You would just have to agree on the rules of when is it considered a delivery at Lee Ferry and when isn’t it a delivery at Lee Ferry,” said Colorado River expert and author Eric Kuhn.
Another problem is that removing the ICS pool from reservoir accounting would leave a 3.2-million-acre-foot hole in Lake Mead that would need to be filled.
“It’s hard to get there because there isn’t a way to make ICS operationally neutral unless you impose the shortages that would occur if the ICS weren’t there,” said Kathryn Sorensen, director of research and professor of practice at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. “I don’t know how else you can do it. You have to pay the piper.”
The infamous bathtub ring around Lake Mead can be seen in this photo of the intakes at Hoover Dam in December 2021. A conservation organization says flexible pools could be used to “move” water from Lake Mead to Lake Powell, where water levels could be critically low this year. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Lower Basin proposal
Last week, the Lower Basin states submitted a proposal to Reclamation to operate the reservoirs through 2028 that includes more conservation. This short-term deal could provide a temporary fix while states continue to hammer out a long-term strategy to share the river.
The Lower Basin states are proposing to cut another 700,000 acre-feet of water per year through 2028, on top of the 1.5 million acre-feet they had already promised. California and Arizona will each take another 300,000 acre-feet of cuts and Nevada will take a cut of 100,000 acre-feet. The proposal does not include any mandatory conservation from the Upper Basin.
“It was a monumental undertaking in a very short time frame to come up with all of this,” said JB Hamby, California’s lead negotiator. “We need a bridge to the future, and we welcome and look forward to an opportunity for a full seven-state deal where all states are part of the solution.”
The Lower Basin proposal also says that this year’s release from Flaming Gorge to prop up Powell should be as close to the maximum amount of Reclamation’s rangeof 1 million acre-feet as possible. The proposal also calls for increasing releases from Lake Powell if hydrology and projected reservoir levels improve.
“The intent under improved hydrology is to share the benefits of improved hydrology between both basins,” the proposal reads.
Colorado’s negotiator, Becky Mitchell, said in a prepared statement that the Lower Basin’s proposal for water-use reductions is a good first step but they still call for too much water to be released out of Lake Powell and other Upper Basin reservoirs.
“The Lower Division States’ proposal would also drain the Upstream Initial Units with limited opportunities for recovery,” Mitchell’s statement reads. “Lake Powell should properly be viewed as a savings account for the Lower Basin: The Lower Basin’s own resiliency depends upon it. The entire Basin should support sustainable, supply-driven operations at Lake Powell that rebuild storage.”
Upper Basin officials have proposed a mediator to help move the needle on talks about future management to try to get to a seven-state deal.
Berggren said that although the concept of a flexible, floating pool doesn’t solve the basic supply-and-demand problem on the Colorado River, it’s still an important tool for future management.
“There are a bunch of other things needed, including Lower Basin users and Upper Basin users using less water overall,” Berggren said. “This is just one component. But it helps provide some benefit in dry years like this one.”
Rio Bosque park manager Sergio Samaniego describes the flow of water into the restored wetland in El Paso, Texas on March 27, 2026. (Amanda Pampuro/Courthouse News)
EL PASO, Texas — The wild waters of the Rio Grande have not flowed freely through the Rio Bosque wetland since 1943.
After being left to run dry for most of the 20th Century, locals in recent years have secured enough water to flood new life into this El Paso ecosystem — though its challenges are far from over. These days, the 372-acre Rio Bosque Wetlands Park gives visitors a glimpse at what the riparian environment looked like long before urbanization and a hardened U.S.-Mexico border fundamentally altered the landscape.
“We’re trying to reestablish the historic environment of the valley for people to experience,” said John Sproul, sporting a worn baseball cap as he hiked through the wetland one windy spring morning.
Although Sproul retired as park manager two years ago, he continues to work here as a volunteer, guiding tours, sharing the park’s history and cultivating its future. That painstaking work entails hand-pulling invasive species and watering new native saplings one by one.
Binoculars slung across his chest, Sproul pointed at a Cooper’s hawk nesting above — one of 270 bird species now observed in the bosque. Though bird diversity has doubled since restoration began in the mid-1990s, he’s still awaiting the return of yellow-billed cuckoos.
Signs of human impact over the years were hard to miss. Empty chip bags caught in the snares of Russian thistle, an invasive species that dries out into rolling tumbleweeds. Clumps of invasive, water-thirsty salt cedar spread their seeds as far as the wind can carry them.
For better or worse, this park is a parable of human intervention. The reconstruction of this wetland is not a story about how environmental management successfully brought an ecosystem back from extinction to thrive on its own. Rather, the wetland now requires constant tending, as humans painstakingly control the flow of water throughout the Chihuahuan Desert region and redirect some of it here.
Spring buds absorb every drop of moisture in the Rio Bosque Wetlands Park in El Paso, Texas, pictured on March 27, 2026. (Amanda Pampuro/Courthouse News)
Water is the single most important factor in determining what lives here.
On average, this area of the Chihuahuan Desert receives just 9 inches of rain each year, with most of that falling during the late summer monsoon. In 2023, the park received just half its usual gift from the sky. Last year, El Paso marked its third-warmest year on record, leaving even average precipitation vulnerable to evaporation.
To make up for the loss of the riverflow, two electric pumps and two windmills run 24 hours a day, feeding Rio Bosque with everything they can pull out of the ground. Though that 500,000 to 700,000 gallons could fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every day, it’s still just a drop in the bucket for what a thirsty wetland needs.
The wetland’s greatest source of water comes from the nearby Roberto Bustamante Wastewater Treatment Plant, which delivers whatever is left over after fulfilling obligations to the surrounding irrigation district. From May to September, when the nearby pecan farms drink irrigated water from the Rio Grande, the treatment plant gives the park an average of 4.5 million gallons per day.
That’s in a typical year, at least. The Rio Grande starts in Colorado, and the Centennial State suffered a dry winter amid a regional drought. Hydrologists are forecasting that 2026 will be one of the driest years for the Rio Grande basin in decades, with most reservoirs’ water levels at just 15% of capacity and the Elephant Butte Dam in New Mexico holding back the Rio Grande’s annual release until later this month.
Elephant Butte Reservoir, along the Rio Grande near Truth or Consequences, N.M., in August 2022. (Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk)
Humans have divided up every drop along the Rio Grande, sustaining not just neighborhood faucets and flushes but a multibillion-dollar agricultural industry. And yet climate change and regional drought leave each year’s water supply uncertain.
Although the treatment plant tends to produce the same amount of water every year, less water in the Rio Grande means the irrigation district will need more graywater this year. That leaves less for Rio Bosque. The water needs of thirsty pecan and alfalfa farms often come first, even under Texas’ rule of capture, where the entity with the strongest pumps gets the most groundwater.
The Rio Bosque wetland has persevered through countless dry spells, as desert ecosystems are evolved to do. But water still marks the difference between a recovering wetland and a stable one.
In the mid-2010s, the treatment plant added a second batch of water deliveries in the winter. The city built the groundwater pumping stations to supplement throughout the year. This creation of year-round moisture helped maintain a water depth that supported the return of native plants. As researchers put it last year in the journal Wetlands, the plant community moved from “invasive tumbleweed to one dominated by tolerant, competitive wetland plants.”
On the tour, Sproul pointed out living proof of the project’s success: young willows, mature willows, evidence of a resident beaver with a growing fan club.
Beavers are a good sign, not just because they require a certain amount of water to move in but also because they give back. By holding water in place, their dams further nourish surrounding plants and strengthen the ecosystem as a whole.
Andrea Everett, a member of the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, recalled a story from her uncle about how a single beaver’s dam created a vibrant “green up” 60 miles upstream at Mesilla Valley Bosque State Park in New Mexico.
Drone view of the Rio Grande and surrounding farmland near Garfield, New Mexico, on March 27, 2026. (Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk)
“There was about an inch to three inches of water that kind of sat in there, and right now there’s about a foot of water because of the beaver,” she said. “This is what one species can do.”
For Everett, Rio Bosque is more than a city park. It’s still part of the Rio Grande, which flowed through just 80 years ago — a blink of an eye, in the grand scheme of things. U.S. border policy limits when and how she can visit the sacred river, but she can always rely on Rio Bosque to rekindle a sense of peace.
“The Rio Bosque is a mitigated wetland, but it still holds some of the original channels,” she explained.
From time immemorial, plants living alongside the Rio Grande adapted to cyclical water patterns, soaking up spring swells, then falling dormant during hot and dry periods.
Animals followed much the same pattern, migrating when there was water and leaving when there was not.
But the fluctuating and temperamental Rio Grande made for a messy national border, as well as a dangerous liability for the rapidly growing cities filling the banks on either side: Ciudad Juarez in Mexico and El Paso in the United States. Thus, in the 1930s, American and Mexican officials agreed on a literal concrete solution: the Rio Grande Rectification Project.
Encasing the channel in concrete, engineers locked the river’s flow into place, redirecting the Rio Grande more than 100 yards away from the historic channel that would become Rio Bosque.
Before the project, Rio Bosque actually sat on Mexico’s side of the border. With the border solidified and a new map drawn up, the dehydrated wetland ended up on U.S. soil. The land was eventually granted to the City of El Paso in 1973 through the Federal Lands to Parks Program.
Without water, thirsty cottonwood and willows dried up. Wetland herons and ducks flew past. Invasive Russian thistle and salt cedar settled into niches left in the newfound dryland.
It looked like the old wetland had been lost — but desert organisms are adept at surviving even decadeslong dry spells. While the willows and native grass vanished from the surface, their seeds remained embedded in the soil, awaiting the right conditions to reawaken.
Rio Bosque park manager Sergio Samaniego, left, speaks as park volunteer John Sproul looks on at the restored wetland in El Paso, Texas. (Amanda Pampuro/Courthouse News)
Even as it comes back to life, the wetland’s challenges continue to grow.
Among them: an increasingly hardened border and urban projects in El Paso.
Although birds can fly over it, the border wall to the east otherwise closes off natural migration into the Rio Bosque. (This section of wall was exempted from the rigors of an environmental review by the Real ID Act of 2005.) On the American side, roads, concrete irrigation canals and lush farms further fence in the wetland. Many locals also fear a proposed highway expansion will be more than the scrappy ecosystem can take.
Although a highway already runs through El Paso, the Texas Department of Transportation released new plans in 2024 to extend Texas State Highway 20 more miles through the city, along a route directed right toward Rio Bosque.
A spokesperson for TxDOT told Courthouse News the department is still evaluating different proposals. The department expects to finalize its plan in December, but many advocates of Rio Bosque are preparing for the worst.
“Everywhere you look, there’s something being built and more layers of concrete going on the desert floor,” said Rick Lobello, founder of the El Paso Wildlife Conservation Society.
All that concrete has implications for native species — including burrowing owls, which Lobello has worked to conserve and actually visits Rio Bosque to observe.
“If you don’t have ground where they can go into a burrow, because it’s been paved over for a parking lot, they struggle,” he said.
An educator by trade, Lobello believes protecting habitat starts with teaching people about it.
“My philosophy is: If you want to protect the environment, then the first thing you got to do is help people know what’s out there,” he said. “If people don’t know what that bush is, if people don’t know what that bird is, they’re never going to love it. And if they don’t love it, they’re never going to fight for it.”
Another big fan of this wetland is Mary González, a Democrat who has represented El Paso in the Texas statehouse since 2012.
“In the middle of a desert, to have a wetland like the Rio Bosque is a true treasure,” González said in an interview. Like others, González worries the Highway 20 expansion might bury it. She hired a consultant to develop an independent environmental review and push back. Still, she says the highway proposal is just the latest development to threaten this fragile ecosystem.
“The location is what makes it unique — but it also makes it challenging,” she said. “It’s right there on the border. It is in a highly trafficked area with continued development.”
Although the land here is healing on its own, park staff and volunteers continue to hand-pull invasive species one by one. Young native trees are often hand-watered and protected with mesh to ensure their roots grow deep.
“One year, we had to bring in a water truck to water the trees,” recalled park manager Sergio Samaniego.
Years ago, as a graduate student, Samaniego conducted fieldwork in Rio Bosque. Today, he’s one of two full-time employees who maintain the park alongside Sproul and other volunteers. This site remains a priceless outdoor classroom and laboratory, where scientists study the diet of burrowing owls, how the border wall affects habitat, and the impacts of wetland restoration on local water quality.
This wetland was once shaped entirely by natural forces. Now, it depends on human intervention. People like Samaniego and Sproul watch for where native seeds are germinating, then move in to support them. They make sure the wetland gets enough water and advocate against threats like highways.
All of it is a delicate, fragile balance, said Samaniego. “We work hard, like the trees.”
This story was produced by Courthouse News Service, with support from The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Capt. Titus Crawford, Director of Bullfrog Marina Services and Dry Storage, talks about the marina before the busy season begins around Memorial Day, Monday, April 27, 2026. Following years of water level fluctuations, the marina is scheduled to undergo it’s largest change when it is moved closer to Halls Crossing Marina in the main channel of the reservoir. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Titus Crawford spent four days calling Lake Powell boaters this spring. After a record low snowpack and off-the-charts March heat, the reservoir was on track to dip so low that Bullfrog Marina would have to move from its namesake bay.
As a captain and director of the popular marina, Crawford knew he needed to call the owners of the roughly 350 boats docked there year-round.
“There’s definitely concerns,” he said. “The biggest portion of it, however, are just happy to be able to keep their boats in the water. …We were very, very lucky that we were able to move this entire operation to another location and continue to be a full-service marina.”
Crawford and his crew began relocating the Bullfrog Marina to deeper water near Halls Crossing on May 4. The relocation process will take about four to six weeks to complete, Crawford said. The boat rental and fuel dock were already moved to Halls Crossing at the end of March.
“There’s just not going to be enough water here shortly to sustain the Bullfrog Marina where it is,” Crawford said.
The marina’s new home near Halls Crossing has “a lot deeper water,” he added. “It’ll be a lot more of a resilient location for us as the water levels change.”
Bullfrog Marina, a major access point for boaters within Lake Powell, which has shifted location numerous times over the years due to fluctuating water levels within the reservoir, is pictured on Monday, April 27, 2026. The next move will be more dramatic as the docs will be moved closer to Halls Crossing Marina in the main channel of the reservoir. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Bullfrog Marina is one of four remaining marinas around Lake Powell. The Bullfrog North Launch Ramp is also just one of two launch ramps that remains open to public motorized vessels, according to the National Park Service, but the agency warns to “launch at your own risk.” The other open ramp, Stateline Auxiliary, is on the southwest end of the lake at Wahweap.
The park service is constructing a primitive ramp at Bullfrog to allow “boats to be launched and retrieved throughout the summer,” a park service spokesperson said over email. Aramark, the park concessioner that manages marinas and lodges around the lake, is also working to further extend the Wahweap Stateline Auxiliary ramp, the park service said.
Moving a marina
Over the next few weeks, marina staff will use tugboats to push whole docks — including giant houseboats with waterslides — at a slow 1 mph pace to the marina’s new home three miles south, Crawford said.
“It’s all floating,” he added while walking along the dock on a calm and sunny morning in late April. “So as we disconnect anchors and cables, we can set new ones and move on to a new location and just push it with tugboats.”
Bullfrog Marina, a major access point for boaters within Lake Powell, is set to be moved closer to Halls Crossing Marina in the main channel of the reservoir due to dropping water levels, Monday, April 27, 2026. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)
While the marina is only moving three miles down the lake, there’s not a direct road between Bullfrog and Halls Crossing, so it will add about an hour to the drive for visitors from the north.
Crawford is exploring the possibility of running a water taxi to shuttle people to their boats from Bullfrog’s old home to the new location. He’s still working out the logistics but said he’s hoping to have a plan figured out once the marina move is complete.
Some small work vessels, particularly towboats, will remain at the former Bullfrog Marina location so staff can quickly access them for emergencies, Crawford added. Those boats, and the dock, will have to move around as the water level continues to drop.
“Due to the low water, there’s a lot of operational changes we’ve got to make,” Crawford said.
Once the rest of the marina is relocated, staff will continue to commute from Bullfrog to the new location each day. Staff live in housing, including dormitory-style units and mobile homes, in Bullfrog provided by Aramark.
“It’s going to be a little bit interesting commuting back and forth across the lake every day,” Crawford said, “but all of our staff will still continue in their same positions at the same marinas.”
House boats are pictured at Bullfrog Marina on Lake Powell on Saturday, April 25, 2026. Glen Canyon National Recreation Area officials plan to move the marina to the deeper waters in the main channel of the reservoir across from Halls Crossing. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Witnessing a changing lake
The new work commute will feel familiar to Crawford: he used to take a boat back and forth between Halls Crossing and Bullfrog, where he attended school as a kid.
“[It] is a little bit different than riding the bus,” he said.
Crawford has called Lake Powell home much of his life. His mom was a store supervisor at Halls Crossing Marina and his dad worked at the same marina in harbor maintenance.
Crawford and his wife even got married on a beach at Lake Powell, booking out half the Defiance House Lodge and renting two houseboats for their guests.
“It was definitely fun getting to explore as a child,” he said. “And then as I grew up, starting to get into driving boats myself, getting my captain’s license, actually really seeing and understanding what was going on was a lot of fun.”
Capt. Titus Crawford, Director of Bullfrog Marina Services and Dry Storage, gives a tour of the marina before the busy season begins around Memorial Day, Monday, April 27, 2026. Following years of water level fluctuations, the marina is scheduled to undergo it’s largest change when it is moved closer to Halls Crossing Marina in the main channel of the reservoir. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Just over 10 years ago, Crawford started working at the reservoir, too. His first job was on the Charles Hall Ferry, which connects State Route 276 across the reservoir.
The ferry, managed by the Utah Department of Transportation, used to travel between Halls Crossing and Bullfrog in 25 minutes. It’s not running this year, though, due to the low water levels.
Over the years, Crawford and the boaters he’s come to know have seen the lake levels fluctuate. “It’s a different lake now,” he said.
Before the current move, the Bullfrog Marina has had to make several adjustments. When the reservoir was at its peak in the 1980s, the marina was nearly a mile back, Crawford said.
In late April, the marina’s power, water and sewer lines that floated in the lake just three years ago — after a record high snow year — hung down a dry rock cliff.
Sewer, water and power lines stretch into Bullfrog Marina, a major access point for boaters within Lake Powell on Monday, April 27, 2026. The marina is scheduled to be moved closer to Halls Crossing Marina in the main channel of the reservoir due to dropping water levels. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Beyond marina shifts, the way Crawford and visitors experience the vast reservoir has also changed.
A canyon that may have been shallow and wide in the past, Crawford explained, now just has a narrow strip of water for boats to squeeze through towering 110-foot walls. The “bathtub rings,” bands of once orange sandstone that now look bleached, remind boaters where the lake formerly reached.
“As the lake water has gone down, there’s been a lot of fun new beaches, new coves, new canyons — stuff that people haven’t seen in generations coming out of the water,” he said. “It’s definitely a good time to explore it.”
Over the last month, he’s taken three groups on private tours to Cathedral in the Desert — a large chamber, lit from a narrow gap in the sandstone walls overhead, that ends at a small, trickling waterfall.
“It’s calm, it’s quiet, very rarely actually sees the sun,” Crawford said. “So it’s just amazing.”
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Creed Murdock, GIS Manager for Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, takes a moment of reflection at Cathedral in the Desert, once covered by water in Clear Creek Canyon, a tributary of the Escalante River arm of Lake Powell on Saturday, April 25, 2026.
Increased visitation to the formerly little-known spot has left its mark, though. Graffiti, including names and years written with charcoal, now covers the orange sandstone walls.
“We definitely discourage it, but there’s not much that we can do about it,” Crawford said.
Park service staff “educates the public about the damage of graffiti through direct education to school classes and volunteer service groups,” a park spokesperson said over email. That includes in-park programming, informal visitor conversations, junior ranger booklets, social media and more.
Graffiti isn’t the only challenge the park service has as the lake changes, though. Low water levels “expose new boating hazards and reveal sensitive resources,” the park service said. Rangers have to manage increased congestion and more inspections for invasive quagga mussels at each launch area because of fewer ramps.
Adjusting boating infrastructure as the lake drops is also costly. The park service plans to award a contract this December for the design and construction of a new ramp at Stanton Creek, which will be the eventual home of Bullfrog Marina. The park service estimates the project will cost $73.4 million.
“The project is complex due to fluctuating lake levels, the need for significant in-water construction and the requirement to run new utilities to support the relocated Bullfrog Marina adjacent to the new ramp,” the park service said.
This article is published through the Colorado River Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative supported by the Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water, and Air at Utah State University. See all of our stories about how Utahns are impacted by the Colorado River at greatsaltlakenews.org/coloradoriver. It was produced in partnership with The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The Colorado River flows through Las Colonias Park in Grand Junction on April 22, 2026. The river reached an extremely low level due to heavy diversion upstream and record low snowpack. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
With drought and high temperatures putting unprecedented pressure on water users throughout Colorado, from cities to agriculture, there’s one segment that can be affected first — and maybe worst — when it comes to a lack of water: rivers themselves and the ecosystems that depend on them.
As cities enact water restrictions and farmers and ranchers prepare for the worst, impacts of the water shortage are readily apparent in a chronically dry stretch of the Colorado River between Palisade and the confluence of the Gunnison River that is critical habitat for endangered fish, known as the 15-mile reach.
The Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program works to return water to this stretch of river in the Grand Valley, but because of this year’s historically dry conditions, the program could have only 16,000 acre-feet, half its typical amount of water for fish.
Beyond that guaranteed amount, the program mostly uses water-sharing agreements that can secure additional acre-feet to boost flows — but only when other users don’t need the water and can voluntarily loan it. This year finds nearly everyone who depends on the Colorado River and its tributaries in dire straits.
There won’t be any surplus water for fish in the Historic Users Pool, which is stored in Green Mountain Reservoir and is the largest source of water to potentially augment fish flows. A pool of water in Ruedi Reservoir that is available in four out of five years isn’t there, and the program could get only about 340 acre-feet from a pool in Wolford Reservoir upstream of Kremmling that typically has up to 6,000 acre-feet.
“It is really clear to me that we do not have enough tools in our toolbox to be able to manage for conditions like we have this year in the 15-mile reach,” said Julie Stahli, recovery program director. “We are so far outside the bounds of what we have ever seen before, that it’s really just hard to be able to make any good decisions.”
Stahli said she anticipates the program can contribute about 75 cubic feet per second through mid-July, at which point they will drop it down to 50 cfs, a bare-bones amount that is just enough to keep the riverbed wet.
“That is what we are anticipating being able to have for the entirety of the season in the 15-mile reach,” she said.
As flows plummet, fish could become stranded in pools that are disconnected from the rest of the river, and program managers say they will try to prevent fish from using that stretch of river during times when flows are predicted to be at their lowest. Crews could use netting to keep fish out of the reach or close the flow of water that returns fish to the river after they accidentally enter an irrigation canal, which would keep them in the stretch of river above the diversion that has more water.
“Our main goal at this point is just to keep fish out of that reach,” Stahli said. “There is not a whole lot of attractive habitat in there right now for fish. Flows dropped so early in the season. We’re already seeing some pretty dire conditions in April.”
For several days in April, flows fell to just over 50 cfs, among the lowest levels in recorded history and far below the recovery program’s target flow for April in a dry year of 1,240 cfs. According to Stahli, the river’s flow at that low point could be solely attributed to recovery-program water that it had released from upstream reservoirs.
The goal of the recovery program when it was created in 1988 was to protect the humpback chub, razorback sucker, bonytail and Colorado pikeminnow, while also allowing the seemingly opposing goal of developing more water. An aim of the program was to allow farms and cities to continue using water and even expand their use without violating the Endangered Species Act.
Palisade High School students released razorback suckers and bonytails they helped raise into the Colorado River on Friday, May 1. The two species live only in the Colorado River Basin and are endangered. (Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism)
And the program has had some success, with one of the four species — the humpback chub — being downlisted from endangered to threatened in 2021. (The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has also proposed downlisting the razorback sucker.) These fish evolved over millions of years and are only found in the Colorado River basin. In today’s highly engineered and managed river ecosystem, they live mostly in just a few key locations in the Upper Basin, including the 15-mile reach, and in parts of the Yampa and Green rivers. Grand Junction’s minor league baseball team has adopted the charismatic fish as its team name and mascot; last year it was the humpback chubs, and now it’s the razorback suckers.
But the program has had trouble meeting target minimum flows in the 15-mile reach, even though upstream water development has not kept pace the way it was expected to. A main culprit is climate change, which has robbed the river of about 20% of its flows during the 21stcentury.
“We just don’t have the tools as a society to be able to handle what’s happening right now in any cohesive way,” Stahli said. “This isn’t an endangered fish problem; this is an everyone problem.”
Why is the river dry?
The reach is just downstream of large Grand Valley agricultural diversions, which are used to grow crops such as corn, alfalfa and the famous Palisade peaches, and which can take a combined 1,950 cfs from the river. At certain times of year, there can be more water in the Grand Valley’s canals than there is in the nearby Colorado River. Collectively, they are the biggest agricultural diversion from the Colorado River on the Western Slope.
“There has been so much diversion and damming of the river farther upstream,” said Bart Miller, healthy rivers director at environmental group Western Resource Advocates. “There are a lot of uses right there, and you’re seeing the impacts of all the Front Range diversions. [The 15-mile reach] is a pinch point in the system based on all the water development we’ve done.”
Side channels on the Colorado River ran dry early during spring runoff on April 22, 2026. Cobble bars and muddy banks emerged as the river receded near Dos Rios Park in Grand Junction. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
Water rights for the environment and recreation were latecomers to the legal system. It wasn’t until the 1970s — nearly 100 years after the most-senior agricultural rights on the Western Slope were established — that Colorado began protecting the value of water in streams with its instream flow program. Under Colorado’s system of water law, those who use water by taking it out of the river — including farmers, cities and industry — usually have the oldest rights, giving them first use of the resource. There’s nothing illegal about drying up a river.
“It’s like you’re running in a race and it’s four laps around the track,” Miller said. “The folks with the instream, recreational, environmental values are there at the starting line, but they’re held back for the first two or three laps. Everyone else is already running. And that’s why the environment often ends up in a really bad place.”
‘April hole’?
It’s not totally unheard of to have a small window of diminished streamflows in April. In a phenomenon known as the “April hole,” irrigation demands in the Grand Valley ramp up, while the needed water remains frozen solid as high-country snowpack. This problem remedies itself within a couple weeks as the snow begins melting. But this year, little snowpack remained by April and water managers think spring runoff at Cameo, where the big Grand Valley diversions are located, peaked during the March heatwave.
Kate Ryan is executive director of the Colorado Water Trust, which works to put water back into streams through temporary water sharing agreements with agricultural, municipal and industrial water users. Although the Water Trust is still finalizing contracts for this year, Ryan said she expects the Water Trust to add about 4,700 acre-feet of water to the 15-mile reach by leasing water from Ruedi Reservoir owned by the town of Palisade, and oil-and-gas company QB Energy.
In past years, water from this project has been released between the end of July and beginning of October. But that timing may change if the recovery program is trying to keep fish out of the reach.
“We will make sure that we deliver water at a point that complements the work of the recovery program,” Ryan said.
The Water Trust has also used the Colorado River Water Conservation District’s water marketing program — where acre-feet are available for purchase — to restore water to streams. But the River District board at its April meeting voted to freeze all new contracts, which are usually doled out first come, first served, while staff figures out the best use of the limited water supply.
Palisade High School students released two species of endangered fish into the Colorado River on Friday, May 1. Target flows for these fish in the 15-mile reach are often not met. (Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism)
The move was part of a series of drought mitigation actions aimed at easing shortages for water users. The board last month also approved a system for prioritizing water sectors, with keeping water in rivers at the bottom of the list: municipal and domestic water needs over agricultural and industrial needs; and agricultural and industrial needs over in-channel uses such as those that benefit the environment, endangered fish and recreation.
The Water Trust this week sent a letter to some water managers recognizing the historic drought and acknowledging that many of its temporary water sharing agreements, which pay water rights holders to leave water in streams, may not operate this year because their agricultural partners may not have enough water for their own use. Projects are voluntary and happen only in years when participants have enough water to share and it can benefit a stream.
But the letter also said there may be others who are interested in using their water rights to help prop up a stream this year.
“There is just so much uncertainty right now that we are trying to be as flexible and responsive as possible,” Ryan said.
Recovery-program officials said this year they will double down on other actions that benefit endangered fish, including removing nonnative predator species such as smallmouth bass and stocking the river with hatchery-raised fish. On Friday, students at Palisade High School released 1,500 young razorback suckers and bonytails that they helped raise into the Colorado River at Riverbend Park in Palisade.
Recovery-program staff said managing the 15-mile reach this year is about preventing the worst impacts and seeing what lessons can be learned from one of the driest years on record.
“It is just new terrain,” said David Graf, instream flow coordinator for the recovery program. “I think we are just flying by the seat of our pants in a lot of ways trying to do triage management as opposed to really adapt.”
For now, one of the few ways to add water back to a depleted river remains borrowing it from other, more senior users.
“I think until our water suppliers and state government hear from people that the environment really is a priority, not just the recovery program and need to support endangered species, but also for communities and local economies across the board, it’s going to stay that way,” Ryan said.
Aspen Journalism is a nonprofit, investigative news organization covering water, environment, social justice and more. Visit aspenjournalism.org.
Winter is more than just a season in the western U.S. – it is a savings account to get farms and homes through the long, dry summer ahead. As the snowpack that accumulates in the mountains through winter slowly melts in late spring and summer, it feeds into rivers and reservoirs that keep communities and ecosystems functioning.
The April 1 snowpack measurement has long been the single most important number in western water management, considered a strong proxy for how much water the mountains are holding in reserve.
The total area of the western U.S. with snow cover was exceptionally low compared with the rest of the 21st century. National Snow and Ice Data Center
As a result, even regions that received near- or above-normal precipitation for the season failed to build substantial snowpack. In the northern Rockies and the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, any above-average snow accumulation was largely confined to the highest elevations, while middle and lower elevations had relatively little snowpack.
This situation is a hallmark of warming winters. As global temperatures rise, the freezing line where precipitation changes from rain to snow moves up the mountains, shrinking the area capable of sustaining a seasonal snowpack.
At the vast majority of the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service’s snow measurement stations across the West, the snowpack’s snow-water equivalent on March 30, 2026, was less than 50% of the 1991-2020 median. Natural Resources Conservation ServiceTemperatures were well above the 20th-century average across the western U.S. in winter 2025-26. National Centers for Environmental Information
The exceptionally warm winter of 2025–26 across much of the western U.S. delivered a powerful preview of what the regional water cycle in a warmer climate may increasingly look like: less snow and a fundamental reshaping of the hydrograph – the chart of how much water flows through streams across the year.
A flattening hydrologic pulse
The consequences of this shift for water supplies are already visible in streamflows.
In multiple river basins in the West, streamflows were above average in winter and early spring, and some locations were approaching record-high levels. Historically, that water would have remained frozen in the snowpack until late spring. Instead, precipitation arriving as rain – along with intermittent midwinter melting events – increased the runoff.
Scientists who study natural water flows, as I do, pay attention to the hydrographs of streamflows in river basins to see when the water flow in mountain streams is strongest and how long that flow is likely to continue into summer.
This hydrograph showing two years of water flows in the St. Mary River near Babb, Mont., reflects the difference between a typical late-spring peak, as 2025 saw, and several midwinter peaks from warm temperatures and rain, as 2026 is seeing. U.S. Geological Survey
In recent years, rising temperatures have led to a redistribution of streamflows throughout the winter and early spring in ways that are fundamentally reshaping the hydrographs of snowmelt-dominated rivers. Rather than a single dominant peak during late spring or early summer, smaller peaks emerge in winter and early spring. At the same time, the traditional snowmelt pulse, relied on to fill reservoirs in late spring, weakens.
In effect, the hydrograph is flattening. The winter of 2025–26 illustrates this phenomenon: Higher early-season streamflows suggest the West will see less runoff later in the year when communities, farms and wildlife need it.
The Colorado River: A system on the edge
Nowhere does the convergence of record warmth, depleted snowpack and altered hydrology carry higher stakes than in the Colorado River Basin. More than 40 million people in seven states plus Mexico and 5.5 million acres of farmland depend on the river’s water, but the river’s flow is no longer meeting demand.
The April-through-July 2026 runoff into Lake Powell – the reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam and the primary index of the Upper Colorado River Basin’s annual water budget – is currently forecast to rank among the lowest in recent decades. It has been tracking close to the grim years of 2002 and 2021, considered benchmarks of western drought.
Unless spring brings substantial late-season snowfall to the high mountains, 2026 could join those years as a marker of how thin the margin between water supply and demand has become in a river system already under sustained stress from two decades of drought and water overuse.
The low reservoir levels in the basin in 2026 and the low snowpack are adding fears of water shortages just as the seven states that rely on the Colorado River are struggling to reach a new water use agreement.
The changing rhythm of water in the West
The winter of 2025–26 highlights two emerging realities.
First, temperature is increasingly dominating precipitation in determining western water supplies. Even above-normal precipitation cannot compensate for persistent warmth when it falls as rain rather than snow and accelerates snowmelt in the mountains.
Second, the nature of the West’s streamflows is shifting in ways that complicate water management.
Rain-on-snow events can produce flooding in winter, as the Seattle area saw in late December 2025. A low snowpack also means less runoff in summer, which can exacerbate water shortages and raise the wildfire risk as landscapes dry out. Even if a year has normal precipitation, if it falls as rain or there is earlier snowmelt, then evaporation through summer, in a warmer climate, will leave less water in the system.
Snowpack declines, earlier runoff, elevated winter flows and flattened hydrographs are all consistent with long-standing projections for the western United States as global temperatures rise.
What makes the winter of 2025-26 notable is how clearly these signals appeared, even in a year without widespread precipitation deficits.
This shift highlights the need for adaptive reservoir operations – the ability to adjust water storage and release decisions in real time to capture earlier runoff and preserve water for longer dry seasons, while still maintaining space in reservoirs for flood control during wetter winters. For communities across the West, it also reinforces the growing reality that the familiar seasonal rhythm of mountain water is changing.
This article, originally published April 1, 2026, has been updated with California’s April 1 measurements.
Glen Canyon Dam, which holds back the waters of Lake Powell, has emerged as a significant water supply chokepoint in the Colorado River basin. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)
PAGE, Ariz. – In the span of U.S. history certain years are turning points, milestones in the nation’s story. 1776. 1865. 1929. 1968. Circumstance and consequence conspire to make it so.
For the Colorado River and those who rely on it, 2026 is on the verge of similar prominence. Circumstances in the basin today are that urgent.
A slow-developing water supply calamity, decades in the making, has boiled over, like a cold war turning hot. Extreme heat in March – triple-digit temperatures never witnessed that early in the year – obliterated a meager snowpack. The basin’s big reservoirs, the supposed buffers against short-term drought, were already uncomfortably low after a quarter-century of declining river flows. They will drop even lower. The amount of water flowing this summer into Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, will be one of the smallest ever measured, barely a trickle.
“This is unprecedented, but it’s not unpredicted,” said Eric Balken, executive director of the Glen Canyon Institute. “I like to say that this is the most predicted disaster of all time.”
Lake Powell is formed by Glen Canyon Dam, a striking 710-ft tall concrete arch braced against ruddy sandstone walls. It plugs the Colorado just after the river enters Arizona. Meant to ensure water deliveries to the lower basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada, Glen Canyon Dam was finished in 1963 to complement the Colorado River’s audacious engineering that distributes water through mountains and uphill to the largest cities in the Southwest and to the region’s most productive farmland. When full, Lake Powell holds enough water to flood the entire state of Virginia to the depth of one foot.
Climate change and water demand that still exceeds supply have flipped the engineering script. Lake Powell is less than 25% full today. Glen Canyon Dam, instead of being a guarantor of water, is now the most significant water chokepoint in the basin. The hard-won asset has become a glaring liability.
Glen Canyon Dam’s powerhouse sits at the base of the 710-foot-tall structure. Hydroelectric generation has dropped in tandem with the falling water levels in Lake Powell. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)
The reversal of fortune is because of how Glen Canyon Dam was designed. The dam was never meant to be operated at the extremely low water levels that Lake Powell is rapidly approaching. Doing so for extended periods of time could damage the pipes that move water through the dam, according to the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the structure.
Reclamation is now studying its options for retrofitting Glen Canyon Dam to accommodate a lower Lake Powell. It expects to release those findings later this year or in early 2027. As any home remodeler knows, renovating an aging structure is neither quick nor cheap, especially when failure could have disastrous consequences.
In the short term, Reclamation is relying on operational band-aids for Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell. With the consent of the seven states in the basin – Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming – the agency took unprecedented action this month to prop up the reservoir. Releasing more water from upstream reservoirs and holding back more in Powell will delay Glen Canyon’s infrastructure reckoning. But that day will soon come, and Reclamation’s answer to the dam’s engineering problems will have far-reaching implications – not only for the reliability of the basin’s water supply, but also for its power customers, ecology, and recreation economy.
An assessment deferred
Dams are difficult to manage under any circumstance. Management is even more troublesome when operators must balance multiple, conflicting objectives. In Glen Canyon’s case those objectives are water supply, flood control, hydropower generation, and releasing water to protect the ecology downstream in the Grand Canyon – namely, beach-building and threatened native fish like the humpback chub. This is in addition to ensuring the safe operation of the dam itself.
How to operate Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam, its larger downstream sibling, is what the seven basin states and Reclamation are attempting to figure out right now. The current agreement covers operations through 2026. Reclamation published a draft environmental impact statement, or EIS, in January that would impose severe cuts on water users in the lower basin, particularly Arizona, in part to protect Glen Canyon Dam’s fragile infrastructure.
For that reason, water users in the lower basin and elsewhere support an engineering fix for Glen Canyon Dam. Many were incredulous that Reclamation did not include an assessment of dam modifications in its draft environmental analysis.
“This EIS could have been a great avenue to look at real changes at Glen Canyon Dam that could solve the water delivery problem and some of the ecological problems, too,” Balken said.
The mineral “bath tub ring” above Lake Powell shows where its water level has been. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)
Patrick Dent is the assistant general manager for water policy at the Central Arizona Project (CAP), which delivers Colorado River water to the densely populated center of the state. He said that CAP does not favor any particular fix – only one that provides dam managers with more flexibility.
“Our primary interest is that they could release water at a lower lake level,” Dent said.
The Gila River Indian Community, which receives Colorado River water through CAP, told Reclamation that the agency has a duty to safeguard the tribe’s water rights, which are at risk if the dam cannot release enough water. “The United States must take action to fix Glen Canyon Dam,” Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis wrote in a March 2026 letter.
The Colorado Water Conservation Board, which represents that state’s water interests, said it supports a reevaluation of Glen Canyon Dam, but “in a separate action” from the EIS.
Becki Bryant, a Reclamation spokesperson, said the agency will release an appraisal study assessing three dam modification alternatives at the end of this year or in early 2027. Any action beyond the study, she said, requires congressional authorization and funding.
‘Antiquated plumbing’
The tool for managing the dam’s multiple objectives, which are a legislative requirement as well as a practical necessity, is the water held in Lake Powell, said David Wegner, a scientist who has worked on Glen Canyon policy for more than four decades. But even water has limits when the engineering is inadequate. “Sadly, these dams were not built for multiple objectives,” Wegner said. And Glen Canyon was certainly not built for extremely low water, he added.
The problem with Glen Canyon is what a coalition of environmental groups calls the dam’s “antiquated plumbing.” The groups – Glen Canyon Institute, Great Basin Water Network, and Utah Rivers Council – published a report in August 2022 that outlined these engineering deficiencies.
Water can exit Glen Canyon in only three ways. One is the spillways, a pressure-release valve for flooding, which are located at elevation 3,648 feet, near the top of the dam. They are irrelevant today. Lake Powell rests 122 feet below them.
The main exit point is through the eight penstocks, the 15-foot diameter tubes that move water through the turbines to generate hydroelectricity. The penstocks are incapacitated when Powell drops below 3,490 feet. (The lake today is 36 feet higher than that level.) If the lake falls below what is known as minimum power pool, hydropower generation also ceases.
If that happens, water must be released through four 8-foot diameter pipes called the river outlet works. Smaller than the penstocks, the river outlet works are located at elevation 3,370. Below that elevation water cannot be released from Powell, a status known ominously as “dead pool.” (Functionally, the river outlet works may be useless at elevation 3,394, Reclamation says.)
As of late April 2026, Lake Powell was less than 25 percent full and projected to drop to a record low in the next 12 months. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)
The environmental groups identified two limitations with the river outlet works. One is that they were not designed to be operated full-time. They are a role player, not the star. The other is that their smaller size means less water can pass through them. That’s a problem because the upper basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming are required to send a set amount of water downstream to the lower basin, according to the 1922 Colorado River Compact that divided the river.
The flow restrictions imposed by the river outlet works, if they had to be used full time, means that the upper basin could violate the compact, which could mean water cutbacks imposed by the lower basin.
“It’s just so counterintuitive that the tool that was designed to meet this delivery obligation” – the construction of Glen Canyon Dam – “is now going to be the roadblock that may prevent the delivery obligation from being met,” said Balken of the Glen Canyon Institute.
The engineering problems are not a new discovery. Wegner, who was with the Bureau of Reclamation at the time as its Grand Canyon environmental studies manager, helped lead a 1987 National Academies report on Glen Canyon. The report recommended that the Interior Department consider the “installation and operation of multiple outlet structures” at Glen Canyon, which would give dam managers more flexibility with water releases.
Glen Canyon’s structural problems were substantiated in 2023, when Reclamation used the river outlet works during an experimental “high-flow” release of water to flush sediment downstream and rebuild eroding Grand Canyon beaches.
The high-volume release caused pitting, or cavitation, within the river outlet works, a risk that was heightened due to the physics of water when Lake Powell is low. Reclamation coated the pipes with epoxy as a temporary fix to prevent more damage, a process that took several months. The agency has since used two small-scale physical models at its Technical Service Center in Denver to test dam operations at low water levels and the effect on infrastructure. Reclamation acknowledged the limitations of the river outlet works in a technical memo published in March 2024 by Richard Lafond, director of the agency’s Technical Service Center. The memo’s conclusions were endorsed by the top decision-makers in Reclamation’s Upper Colorado River Office.
“Long term operation of the river outlet works will result in accelerating regular operation and maintenance tasks,” LaFond wrote. Reclamation should “not rely on the river outlet works as the sole means for releasing water from Glen Canyon Dam.”
Wegner put it in starker terms. If the river outlet works had to be relied upon and the pipes began to erode again, then Reclamation could potentially lose control of water flows.
“Potentially that could fail,” Wegner said, meaning an inability to control water releases through the dam if the pipes are structurally compromised. “And if that fails, now you have a catastrophe on your hand and you have limited options to manage that catastrophe.”
In other words, there would be no way to release water downstream into the Grand Canyon and into the lower basin.
Neither quick nor easy
What fixes are possible? Reclamation received $2 million from Congress in the fiscal year 2022 budget for an appraisal study. Reclamation outlined three engineering possibilities in a 2023 presentation, most of which centered on preserving hydropower generation as Lake Powell declines.
One possibility is a new, lower intake that uses the existing power generation turbines. An intake located deeper in the reservoir would allow Glen Canyon to pass water in what is currently dead pool. But it would entail “increased risk from penetration through the dam.”
The second would connect new power generation equipment to the river outlet works.
The third option is tunneling through the canyon wall and installing a new underground power station. This would also provide more flexibility for water releases.
Reclamation also included three operational or policy changes for power production, including investing in wind and solar to offset hydropower declines.
Other ideas that seemed kooky and fringe just a few years ago – draining Lake Powell and filling Lake Mead first; changing the basin’s water accounting system – are now being discussed throughout the basin with more seriousness and candor.
Glen Canyon Dam, completed in 1963, was not designed to be operated at extremely low water levels that Lake Powell is now approaching. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)
Beyond that presentation, Reclamation has not said much publicly about dam modification. The agency declined an interview request to discuss Glen Canyon Dam’s engineering problems.
Whatever direction Reclamation chooses – an option outlined above or something new – the process will not be quick or easy. Any change to Glen Canyon must go through an environmental analysis and public comment period. Congress will have to authorize actions and appropriate the funds. Construction alone will take years.
Wegner, who was the staff director for the House Natural Resources Water and Power Subcommittee from 2008 to 2014, knows the difficulty and sees a lack of leadership. “There’s nobody in Washington who has been willing to lead the charge trying to get Congress to provide authorized funding to do this sort of work.”
‘Reservoir triage’
Because Reclamation is not confident it can operate the river outlet works for an extended run, the agency is focused on keeping Powell above elevation 3,500 feet.
Protecting 3,500 feet comes with all sorts of baggage. It preserves hydropower generation, which power customers appreciate. But in effect the redline at that elevation strands some 4.4 million acre-feet in Lake Powell. (Only 3.7 million acre-feet is technically accessible with the current plumbing.) Some have called this elevation a “de facto” dead pool. Thus, the agitation in the lower basin for a plumbing system within the dam that provides access to this water.
Balken said that downstream water deliveries, not preserving hydropower, should be Reclamation’s biggest concern.
“When these decision makers are talking about Glen Canyon Dam from only a hydropower perspective, I think it’s missing the larger point, which is the dam is about to become the biggest roadblock of water deliveries that the basin has ever seen,” Balken said.
Flows from upstream Flaming Gorge reservoir will be used this spring and summer to bolster the flagging levels at Lake Powell, the nation’s second largest reservoir. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)
To avoid the infrastructure risks of dropping below 3,500 feet, Reclamation has started to take extraordinary action. The agency has two emergency levers it is pulling. One is to hold more water back in Lake Powell. Reclamation cut water releases to the legal minimum this year, something it has never done. The other is releasing more water from Flaming Gorge, a reservoir upstream that is in better shape.
As Balken describes it, “This is reservoir triage.”
These emergency actions have serious side-effects. Upstream, Flaming Gorge is expected to lose 35 feet of elevation by next spring, once the extra water has been released. That will hurt the recreation economy of northeastern Utah and southwestern Wyoming – fewer boat ramps in the water, less fishing access.
These upstream releases have limited utility, Wegner said. “You can do that once or twice. But you got to then depend upon Mother Nature refilling those reservoirs upstream.”
Downstream, Lake Mead will drop quickly and it too will approach a level in which hydropower generation at Hoover Dam severely drops. Algal blooms in a warmer, shallower lake could be a problem. “They’re going to be robbing Mead to pay Powell,” Balken said.
Trying not to hit bottom
The idea of dead pool – when Lake Powell can no longer release water – was almost inconceivable when the reservoir was designed and filled. The official device for measuring Lake Powell’s elevation ends at the top of the penstocks, at elevation 3,477.5 feet. According to Reclamation’s 2024 technical memo, “This is an indication that reservoir elevations below minimum power pool” – 3,490 feet – “were not anticipated.”
Reclamation finished filling the reservoir in 1980. Three years later, after an intense El Niño winter, the dam’s upper limits were tested. Floodwaters in the summer of 1983 nearly broke the dam. Such volumes are almost inconceivable now.
In a typical year, Lake Powell would be rising in late April, flush with the deposits of snowmelt from headwater basins in the Rocky Mountains. Not this year. The snowpack peaked in many basins in late February or early March. What little snow there was has already melted. As of April 28, Lake Powell inflows are projected to be just 16% of average. Lake level forecasts from mid-April showed a long downward slope for the next 12 months. Those projections were what triggered the emergency release of water from Flaming Gorge and the reduction in Lake Powell releases.
Scientists have been warning about circumstances like this for years. In a defining period for the basin, all the predictions of water supply shocks in the Colorado River from the past two decades are coming to pass.
“We should have been prepared for this,” Balken 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.
Flaming Gorge Reservoir stores water from the Green River in Wyoming, and is shared by Wyoming and Utah. (Ted Wood/The Water Desk)
On April 17, the federal government ordered emergency measures to prevent water levels at Lake Powell from falling so low that Glen Canyon Dam, which created the reservoir, could no longer generate power or deliver water downstream. Without this intervention, models showed that the reservoir could drop below safe operating levels in August, meaning that the river would not have a reliable way to flow past the dam. This would threaten water and power supplies for millions of people across the Southwest, as well as the flow of water through the Grand Canyon.
Across the Colorado River Basin, an extremely low snowpack combined with a record-shattering March heat wave, have left water managers with few other options. The region’s reservoirs were already depleted from years of relying on wet winters to balance the growing demand with the ongoing drought.
The Bureau of Reclamation ordered releases from Flaming Gorge Reservoir, which straddles the Utah-Wyoming border, to bolster Lake Powell’s water levels. At the same time, the amount of water delivered from Powell to downstream users will be significantly reduced.
“This is a short-term solution,” said Jenny Dumas, water attorney for the Jicarilla Apache Nation, which sits near the border of Colorado and New Mexico. “It’s going to take time to recover these reservoirs before we can do this again. So while we can exhaust our reserves to avoid system collapse this year, it means reserves won’t be there next year.”
This is not the first time water managers have turned to Flaming Gorge to stabilize the larger river system. In 2022, the federal government ordered the reservoir to release 550,000 acre-feet to stabilize the downstream river system, which disrupted recreation and rattled upstream communities. This time, Reclamation has authorized releases of up to 1 million acre-feet. Over the next year, a third of the reservoir’s storage is expected to be gradually released. By September, water levels are projected to drop about 12 feet.
“This is an unprecedented release volume — more than double the last time,” said Amy Haas, executive director of the Colorado River Authority of Utah, who briefed communities bracing for the releases at Flaming Gorge Reservoir. “We really just don’t know the actual impacts of these releases to surrounding communities, and our water users are struggling. My goodness, we are on target to become one of the worst water years on record. The forecasts are stunning to all of us.”
The amount of water projected to flow into the river from snowmelt is rapidly declining. Over the first two weeks of April, forecasts for Lake Powell fell by 500,000 acre-feet. The spring forecast is shifting so quickly, some experts believe the releases from Flaming Gorge may need to increase.
“I think it’s a target, and they’re going to have to revise it,” said veteran water manager and researcher Eric Kuhn, who co-authored a paper last September predicting this kind of shortage and calling for action. “It’s many river miles from Flaming Gorge to Lake Powell. What are the transit losses?”
“Also, when March looked like June, what are June and July going to look like?” he added. “I could easily see that 1 million becomes 1.5 million acre-feet by March of 2027.”
Kuhn sees the emergency actions as a sign of broader failure to address the underlying issues that led to the current situation. “The Department of Interior no longer acknowledges that the fundamental problem is climate change. We’re dealing with the symptoms of the disease. We’re not dealing with the underlying problem,” he said. “The law of the river was written for a river that no longer exists from a hydrologic standpoint.”
Flaming Gorge Reservoir straddles the Utah-Wyoming border and has remained a bright spot for water storage in the Colorado River basin amid worsening conditions elsewhere in the watershed. (Ted Wood/The Water Desk)
In an April 21 meeting, Upper Basin state commissioners acknowledged the need for emergency action but warned that this was not a long-term solution.
“I want to make darn sure people understand … the incredibly difficult, heartbreaking decisions that are having to be made with the lives of generations of cattle production, and farming communities in the Upper Basin states,” particularly in Utah, said Gene Shawcroft, Utah’s Colorado River commissioner.
Wyoming Commissioner Brandon Gebhardt reported that 13,000 acres of agricultural land in the South Piney drainage on the eastern slopes of the Wyoming Range had been cut off from water, adding that even some of the state’s oldest and most senior water rights — some dating to 1898 — will likely be impacted.
“We expect three of the five Flaming Gorge boat ramps in Wyoming will be rendered unusable, and low reservoir levels will have long-lasting negative impacts on reservoir fisheries,” said Gebhardt. “We recognize what we are approving today will have significant negative impacts on our water resources, local economies and recreation.”
Shortage is affecting more than agriculture and recreation. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, for example, reported its sacred springs going dry, affecting ceremonies, and the tribal farm will have to operate with just 14% of its normal water supply. Meanwhile, the Jicarilla Apache Nation said it received just 25% to 35% of its contracted water allocation, leaving tribal leaders uncertain about whether they can divert enough water from the Navajo River to meet the community’s domestic needs.
With no sign of long-term agreement on how to manage the river past September, legal tensions among the basin states remain high.
Arizona’s Department of Water Resources released a statement agreeing with plans to order upstream releases to stabilize Lake Powell but also warning that the revised downstream releases were “substantially less than required under the 1922 Colorado River Compact,” referencing the foundational legal document dividing the river. “Failure to comply,” the release stated, “is itself a serious development that Arizona will assess and respond to accordingly.”
Upper Basin state commissioners plan to hold a special meeting to revisit the issue and vote on whether to continue emergency actions past August after assessing water levels and determining whether or not the releases are working.
Regardless of the possible legal battles, the reduced water in the river, infrastructure limits and political gridlock have left basin communities feeling uncertain about their future water security. After the planned releases from Flaming Gorge, if next winter brings another dry year, it is unlikely that upstream reservoirs will have enough water to stabilize Lake Powell.
The basin needs more than emergency actions, Dumas said. “We really want to emphasize the need for serious and permanent changes in how we use and manage the river to adjust to current and future hydrology.”
This story was produced by High Country News, in partnership with The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder.
