The Colorado River divides Glenwood Canyon slurry on the ridge from the Grizzly Creek Fire on Monday, August 24, 2020. (Kelsey Brunner/The Aspen Times)
By Heather Sackett
The Grizzly Creek Fire in Glenwood Canyon has many people praying for rain. But the very thing that could douse the blaze, which has burned 32,000 acres as of Tuesday, has some experts concerned it also could create problems for downstream endangered fish.
A heavy rain could wash dirt — no longer held in place by charred vegetation — and ash from the steep canyons and gullies of the burn area into the Colorado River. Scorched soils don’t absorb water as well, increasing the magnitude of the flood. And the heavy sediment load in the runoff could suffocate fish. A similar scenario played out in 2018 when thousands of fish were killed by ash and dirt that washed into the Animas River from the 416 Fire burn area.
Downstream from the Grizzly Creek Fire, beginning in DeBeque Canyon, is critical habitat for four species of endangered fish: humpback chub, Colorado pikeminnow, bonytail and razorback sucker.
“Yes, we are very concerned about a fire in that kind of terrain that close to critical habitat. There’s just no question,” said Tom Chart, director of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program. “There’s a probability we could have an effect all the way down into the 15-mile reach.”
The Colorado River’s so-called 15-mile reach, near Grand Junction, is home to those four species of fish. This stretch often has less water than is recommended for these fish by Fish & Wildlife mainly because of two large irrigation diversions that pull water from the river to irrigate Grand Valley farms: DeBeque Canyon’s Grand Valley Project, which takes water from the river at a structure known as the Roller Dam, and the Grand Valley Irrigation Canal, which takes water from the river near Palisade.
Between these diversions and the confluence of the Gunnison River is a problem spot where water managers constantly work to bolster water levels through upstream reservoir releases. According to Chart, there is currently a total of about 250 cubic feet per second being released from Ruedi, Wolford and Granby reservoirs for the benefit of fish in the 15-mile reach.
With hot, dry weather, a weak monsoon season and the ongoing diversions for irrigation season, which continue into the fall, current river conditions are already stressful for the fish, Chart said. Water managers say they have seen fish using fish ladders to swim upstream and downstream of the 15-mile reach in search of deeper, cooler water.
“As far as concern about the ecological health of the 15-mile reach right now, we are very concerned about conditions there right now,” Chart said. “Native fish do move out of those dewatered stretches in search of better conditions.”
A debris flow on top of these already-challenging conditions could be devastating for fish populations.
“The potential with the Grizzly Creek Fire could be as bad as it gets if we get a rainstorm on top of a low baseflow,” Chart said. “You pray for rain, but at the same time this would be a tough time to get a flow of ash and retardant off the burned area.”
This map shows the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River near Grand Junction, home to four species of endangered fish. Experts are concerned that rain on the Grizzly Creek Fire burn area could create ash and sediment flows that could pose a threat to fish. Source: Colorado Water Conservation Board
Burned area assessment begins
The U.S. Forest Service’s Burned Area Emergency Response team has done a preliminary assessment of the severity of the soil burns to determine where debris flows would most likely occur, according to Lisa Stoeffler, deputy forest supervisor for the White River National Forest.
Areas of concern include Dead Horse Creek, Cinnamon Creek and No Name Creek, among others. More than an inch of rain in an hour — or a quarter-inch in 15 minutes, as occurs in a fast-moving thunderstorm — could trigger a debris flow, the BAER team found.
But this initial assessment, Stoeffler said, is mostly focused on potential impacts to Interstate 70, and water and power infrastructure, not on impacts to the aquatic environment.
“We may look at environment later on, once we have a final footprint of the fire,” she said. “The BAER process is really looking at things that we would need to address because it would cause an emergency-type situation.”
When the Grizzly Creek Fire first broke out, the city of Glenwood Springs switched its municipal water source from Grizzly and No Name creeks, which are near the burned area, to the Roaring Fork River.
“We are concerned about the ash and debris entering the water system and the costs we are going to incur because of this,” said Hannah Klausman, public information officer for Glenwood Springs.
The 15-mile reach of the Colorado River near 19 Road in Grand Junction is home to four species of endangered fish. The Colorado River Water Conservation District is discussing releasing water from upstream reservoirs to help dilute any ash and sediment flows from the Grizzly Creek Fire. (Brent Gardner Smith/Aspen Journalism)
Solution is dilution
Since preventing the dirty runoff from reaching the river would be difficult, if not impossible, in the steep, rocky terrain, the best bet, Chart said, would be tapping into upstream reservoir water to flush sediment and ash.
In other words: The solution to pollution is dilution.
The Roaring Fork River, which flows into the Colorado at Glenwood Springs, also would help dilute the ash and sediment before it got to the 15-mile reach. Some of it would probably settle out before it got there anyway. But that would do little to help native fish populations closer to the burn area. Although not listed as endangered, other species such as flannelmouth sucker, bluehead sucker and roundtail chub also could be impacted.
“We get concerned about the endangered fish the most, but it’s really the entire native fish community we need to be paying attention to,” Chart said.
The Colorado River Water Conservation District has some water in Wolford and Ruedi reservoirs that could potentially be used for a flushing flow. But it would take careful coordination between reservoir operators. And it could be a complicated juggling act to figure out how to accommodate all the different demands for that limited water supply, said River District chief engineer John Currier.
“I think we stand ready to try and figure out how to do something,” Currier said. “It will be a topic of discussion sooner rather than later.”
Managing the impacts of the burned landscape on the fish will be ongoing long after the fire is extinguished.
“I think this is going to be an issue for years to come,” Chart said. “That landscape is going to take a long time to heal.”
Aspen Journalism is a local, nonprofit, investigative news organization covering water and rivers in collaboration with The Aspen Times and other Swift Communications newspapers. This story ran in the Aug. 26 edition of The Aspen Times, the Vail Daily, and Aspen Journalism.
A center pivot irrigates a field in the San Luis Valley, where the state is warming farmers that a well shut-down could come much sooner than expected. Credit: Jerd Smith
The race against time continues for farmers in southern Colorado’s San Luis Valley, with the state’s top water regulator warning that a decision on whether hundreds of farm wells will be shut off to help save the Rio Grande River could come much sooner than expected.
July 28, at a virtual symposium on the Rio Grande River, the state warned growers that they were running out of time to correct the situation.
“We’ll see in the next couple of years if we can turn around this trick,” said State Engineer Kevin Rein. “If we’re not turning it around, we need to start having that more difficult conversation.”
The valley is home to the nation’s second-largest potato economy and growers there have been working voluntarily for more than a decade to wean themselves from unsustainable groundwater use and restore flows in the Rio Grande. Thousands of acres of land have been dried up with farmers paying a fee for the water they pump in order to compensate producers who agree to fallow land.
The San Luis Valley, which receives less precipitation than nearly any other region in Colorado, is supplied by the Rio Grande, but under the river lies a vast aquifer system that is linked to the river. It once had so much water that artesian springs flowed freely on the valley floor.
As modern-day farmers began putting powerful deep wells into the aquifer, aquifer levels declined, and flows in the river declined too as a result, hurting the state’s ability to deliver Rio Grande water downstream to New Mexico and Texas, as it is legally required to do.
Between July 2019 and July 2020 the valley’s unconfined aquifer, which is fed by the Rio Grande River, dropped by 112,600 acre-feet. All told the aquifer has lost around 1 million acre-feet of water since the drought of 2002.
Through a plan written by growers in the valley and approved by the state in 2011, farmers had 20 years, from 2011 to 2031, to restore the aquifer. But multiple droughts in the past 19 years have made clear that the region can’t rely on big snow years to replenish the valley’s water supplies because there are fewer of them, thanks to climate change.
“So what is the future, the short-term future, if we can’t count on climate? And let’s admit we can’t,” Rein said. “If climate’s not cooperating the only thing that can be done is consuming less water.”
Adding to pressure on the region is a proposal by Denver developers to buy thousands of acres of the valley’s farm land, leaving some of the associated water rights behind to replenish the aquifer, while piping thousands of acre-feet of water northeast to the metro area.
Rein said drastic steps, like drying up more fields and sharply limiting how much growers can pump, are needed. But this could result in bankruptcies and could cripple the valley’s $370 million agriculture economy, which employs the majority of workers in the region. Worse still, though, would be the shutdown of all wells in the region, which is what could occur if farmers aren’t able to make progress toward aquifer sustainability.
While the deadline to restore the aquifer is set for 2031, if it becomes clear before then that growers aren’t able to restore groundwater levels, Rein will be forced to take action early by turning off all wells.
Rein said his decision likely won’t come as early as next year. But, he said, “Do we wait until 2031, the deadline? Probably not.”
The groundwater challenges and associated deadline stem from Colorado’s historic 2002 drought which led to more groundwater pumping than ever before and resulted in a falling water table, decreases in water pressure, and failing wells.
Groundwater declines have been so severe that they’ve affected surface water levels in parts of the valley. In 2004, state lawmakers passed a bill requiring the state to begin regulating the aquifer to make it more sustainable.
Landowners within the Rio Grande Water Conservation District (RGWCD) responded by forming a groundwater management district known as Subdistrict 1—that was just the first of what will soon be seven approved subdistricts.
Subdistrict 1 set goals and developed a plan of water management in late 2011 that spelled out how to reduce groundwater depletions and recharge the aquifer.
In 2012 they began paying a fee for every acre-foot of water used. That revenue helps pay irrigators who elect to participate in voluntary fallowing programs and other efforts to replenish the river and reduce stress on the aquifer.
And by 2017, irrigators had restored 350,000 acre-feet of water in the aquifer, halfway to their goal. But drought and disaster struck in 2018. With less surface water available and high temperatures, irrigators pumped heavily to maintain their crops. And by September 2018, farmers had lost about 70 percent of the groundwater gains they had worked so hard to recover.
“2018 was extremely frustrating,” said Cleave Simpson, manager of the RGWCD who is also a fourth-generation grower. ”It really kind of set us back to where we were when we started this in 2012.”
It’s not over yet. Some of that groundwater lost in 2018 has been recovered and this year participation in the fallowing program is higher than ever, with more than 13,000 acres enrolled, according to Amber Pacheco who manages the RGWCD’s subdistrict programs—that’s in addition to the 8,800 acres fallowed through the conservation programs that have been running since 2012.
Simpson and others, faced with another severe drought year, are deeply worried about the success of their conservation efforts, but dire times are also boosting motivation to solve the problem, Simpson said.
“There’s a sense of urgency from the board of managers that we’ve got to keep doing more,” Simpson said. “We’ve got to get back what we lost.”
Caitlin Coleman is the Headwaters magazine editor and communications specialist at Water Education Colorado. She can be reached at caitlin@wateredco.org.
Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org
This story originally appeared on Fresh Water News on August 5, 2020.
Water Desk Director Mitch Tobin talks to Cynthia Koehler, executive director of the Water Now Alliance, about the many challenges facing water providers and the solutions they are pursuing to make water systems more resilient and sustainable.
Episode highlights
Cynthia Koehler, WaterNow Alliance An environmental attorney and water policy expert, Koehler advises communities and water utilities on conservation and resilience.
Water Words: ‘Demand Hardening’ According to the Alliance for Water Efficiency, demand hardening happens when “prior conservation makes future demand reductions harder to achieve.” Starts at 22:11
If you’re interested in appearing on the show, please contact Water Desk Director Mitch Tobin at mitchtobin@colorado.edu. If you’d like to share your comments and questions, you can reach us at waterdesk@colorado.edu, or on Twitter and Facebook.
In the August installment of Our Land, environmental correspondent Laura Paskus revisits the Gold King Mine spill and the destructive impact of the toxic orange plume that went flowing down the Animas and San Juan rivers five years ago. The waste released when crews tried to reopen the abandoned mine killed fish and coated river banks with heavy metals. Paskus reports with help from a grant by The Water Desk, and independent journalism initiative based at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
A view of the popular Pumphouse campground, boat put-in and the upper Colorado River. The BLM and Forest Service recently approved an alternative management plan that acts as a workaround to a federal Wild & Scenic designation. Photo by Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism.
Participants in a 12-year process to establish protections for a stretch of the upper Colorado River are calling the finished product — which amounts to a workaround of a Wild and Scenic River designation — a success.
Last month, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service formally approved the “Amended and Restated Upper Colorado River Wild and Scenic Stakeholder Group Management Plan.” The plan lays out a blueprint for protecting the “outstandingly remarkable values,” or ORVs, of the Colorado River from Kremmling to Glenwood Springs, with an emphasis on recreational floatboating and fishing.
The ORVs must either be a unique, rare or exemplary feature located on the river or shoreline; contribute to the functioning of the river ecosystem; or owe their existence to the presence of the river. The plan seeks to balance these ORVs with water development and use by Front Range water providers and Western Slope water users.
To ensure protection of the ORVs, the plan includes voluntary cooperative measures that the participants could take, such as the strategic timing of reservoir releases, enhancing spring peak flows and agreements with water users to acquire water rights, which would be used to preserve the natural environment.
The plan includes a provision that addresses two big uncertainties that would lead to more transmountain diversions from the Colorado River: Denver Water’s Moffat Collection System Project and the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District’s Windy Gap Firming Project. The “poison pill” provision would allow any stakeholder to withdraw support for the plan if those projects — which are still in the permitting phase and mired in litigation, and which would provide a combined 48,000 acre-feet of water for the Front Range — negatively impact streamflows, especially for boating.
Six interest groups — conservation/environment/fishing; local government; recreational floatboating; state interests; Front Range water users; and Western Slope water users — have been working on crafting the plan since 2008. The Eagle River Watershed Council has been involved as a stakeholder since 2013, said executive director Holly Loff.
“It’s really exciting, and what a huge collaborative effort this has been, and I can’t really think of other situations that have been larger in scope and larger in the number of collaborators and all with very diverse interests — and we found a way to make it work,” Loff said. “It’s an amazing feat, really.”
The scenic, and sometimes wild, Rodeo Rapid, one of the few rapids on the upper Colorado River between Pumphouse and Dotsero. Photo by Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Option to W&S
The alternative management planning process came about after the BLM in 2007 found that 54 miles of the upper Colorado River from Gore Canyon to just east of No Name Creek in Glenwood Canyon possessed enough ORVs that they were eligible for a federal Wild & Scenic River designation. Created by an act of Congress in 1968, the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System seeks to preserve rivers with outstandingly remarkable scenic, recreational, geologic, fish and wildlife, historic and cultural values in a free-flowing condition.
There are two ways that a river can be designated as Wild & Scenic: The secretary of the Interior can designate a river if a state governor requests it or Congress can designate a river, usually after a land-use agency conducts a study to see whether it’s eligible.
Designation as Wild & Scenic brings protection from development. For example, new dams cannot be constructed on the designated stretch and federal water-development projects that might negatively affect the river are not allowed.
But the possibility of federal government involvement and potential restrictions on water development on the upper Colorado doesn’t sit well with some groups. Municipal water providers such as Denver Water and Northern Water divert water from the Colorado’s headwaters to Front Range cities.
“A lot of members of the water community find the idea of a Wild & Scenic designation kind of frightening and prohibitive,” said Colorado Water Conservation Board Stream and Lake Protection Section Chief Linda Bassi. “It would prevent potentially new reservoirs along a Wild & Scenic river (and) certain types of structures, and that is why the water community has typically been a little leery of Wild & Scenic designation.”
In 2009, the Colorado General Assembly established the Wild and Scenic Rivers Fund. Despite what its name suggests, the fund is not dedicated to establishing Wild & Scenic designations of rivers, but to avoiding the federal designation through “work with stakeholders within the state of Colorado to develop protection of river-dependent resources as an alternative to wild and scenic river designation.”
The Upper Colorado River Wild and Scenic Stakeholder Group has been the recipient of money from the state fund, which is allocated up to $400,000 a year and administered by the Colorado Water Conservation Board. According to a CWCB memo from May, when staff reviews requests for these funds, they evaluate whether projects will promote collaboration among traditional consumptive water interests, including irrigation, and non-consumptive interests, including recreation and the environment, and whether the project will still enable Colorado to fully use water it is allocated.
“If we tried to go through designation, we don’t know if it would have ever made it past the state of Colorado,” said Kay Hopkins, outdoor recreation planner for the White River National Forest. “The state would have had to be supportive of our determination.”
Despite its renowned river rafting, fishing and scenic beauty, which contribute to the recreation-based economy of many Western Slope communities, Colorado has just 76 miles of one river — the Cache La Poudre — designated as Wild & Scenic. That’s less than one-tenth of 1% of the state’s 107,403 river miles.
Instead of a federal designation, the CWCB considers its instream-flow program to be a primary tool in the effort to protect ORVs. Instream flows are in-channel water rights aimed at preserving the natural environment to a reasonable degree. As a part of the alternative management plan process, the CWCB secured three instream-flow rights that date to 2011 on the upper Colorado River — from the confluence of the Blue River to Piney River; from Piney River to Cabin Creek; and from Cabin Creek to the confluence with the Eagle River.
Bassi, who runs the state’s instream-flow program, has participated in the state interests group since planning began in 2008.
“Those flow rates are designed primarily to meet the needs of fish,” Bassi said. “But they will help to maintain flows that provide for some levels of boating experiences.”
This map shows a stretch of the upper Colorado River, between Kremmling and Glenwood Springs, that is subject to a new framework designed to protect ecological and recreational values, in balance with the needs of water users on the Western Slope and Front Range. Map from Upper Colorado River Wild and Scenic Stakeholder Group.
Pragmatic discussions
The Forest Service and BLM approval of the alternative management plan means that the stretch of the upper Colorado River has been deferred from Wild & Scenic eligibility. But if the plan fails or any of the stakeholders enact the “poison pill” provision, the river could revert to being considered for eligibility, meaning it would once again be up for federal scrutiny, something some stakeholders want to avoid.
“That is the hammer behind the long-term commitments,” said Rob Buirgy, coordinator for the stakeholder group.
Eagle County Commissioner and Colorado River Water Conservation District Board member Kathy Chandler-Henry believes the strength of the alternative management plan is the input of its many participants.
“My first thought was the alternative management plan must be a lesser system of protection, but in my mind, it has not turned out to be that way because there are so many players at the table,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like a lesser process. It seems like a more publicly engaged process.”
Loff was more pragmatic.
“I don’t think (the alternative management plan) is better, but I don’t know that this group ever would have agreed to a standard Wild & Scenic designation. I don’t think that would have happened at all,” she said. “I think it’s better that we have this.”
Aspen Journalism is collaborating with the Aspen Times and other Swift Communications newspapers on coverage of water and rivers. This story was published online and printed in the Aspen Times on July 11, 2020 and published by Aspen Journalism on July 11, 2020.
Nearly one year after the state ordered Yampa River water users to begin measuring their diversions from the iconic river, local community groups have raised more than $200,000 to help cash-strapped ranchers and others install the devices needed to comply with the law.
According to Erin Light, the top water regulator in the region, roughly 60 percent of diversion structures, about 1,760 in total, remain out of compliance in what is known as Colorado’s Water Division 6, which includes the Yampa, North Platte, White and Green river basins.
Under state law, water users who do not measure their diversions can be subject to prosecution and have access to their water rights suspended, something the state has threatened to do but has not yet implemented.
Local groups, including the Upper Yampa Water Conservancy District and the Yampa/White/Green Basin Roundtable, have stepped up to help, creating a $200,000 grant fund to ensure those who are trying to comply can afford to do so.
“Everyone is interested in getting the best infrastructure we can into the river,” said Holly Kirkpatrick, who is overseeing the grant program for the conservancy district. “A lot of different organizations are working very hard on this.”
The Yampa River Fund, spearheaded by The Nature Conservancy, also plans to step in with funding should the need arise.
“I envision that there will be a request for funding,” said fund manager Andy Baur, “and we are here to help.”
This remote region in the northwest corner of the state for decades has had so much water that regulators rarely had to step in to ensure the rivers’ supplies were being properly distributed in accordance with state water law, something it does routinely in Colorado’s other major river basins. But as water shortages loom in the state, the Yampa is coming under increasing scrutiny.
“People need to understand that if we find ourselves in another administrative situation [where the Yampa runs dry as it did in 2018], people need to know they will be shut off,” said Light, who oversees the region for the Colorado Division of Water Resources.
The Yampa River in Northwest Colorado. Photo by Adobe Stock.
The picture is much different than even 20 years ago, when Yampa Valley ranchers and other water users with water rights were often able to divert as much as they wanted whenever they wanted because the river had huge flows and relatively few demands.
Light, who oversees the Yampa and North Platte basins, as well as the Green and White river sub-basins, said the White River region has the most work to do to comply with the state’s order, with 83 percent, or 596, of its diversion structures taking water that is not being measured.
On the Yampa River, 50 percent of diversion structures, or 900, remain unmeasured, Light said. In the North Platte, 34 percent, or 190, lack measuring devices, while in the Green 74, or 69 percent, of devices remain unmeasured, Light said.
Because the White and Green sub-basins are so remote, and installing measuring devices can cost thousands of dollars, Light said she is giving water users there another year to comply with the order.
At the same time, she said she has granted more than 100 extensions to water users who are trying to comply to give them more time to find funds and get the work done.
Light said she is hopeful ranchers and others will begin to understand that measuring is no longer optional, and that those who begin recording their water use will have new opportunities as the entire Colorado River system, to which the Yampa, White and Green rivers are tributary, moves into a water-short future.
Under at least one scenario now being studied, a large, statewide conservation program called demand management would pay ranchers and others to voluntarily forego their water diversions for a period of time. Options to receive payment for suspending use would only be available to those who have diversion records that demonstrate how much water they’ve historically used.
“If someday we have an opportunity to [temporarily] dry up lands under a demand management program, their [actual water] use will be greatly in question because they have not measured their water. As demands get higher in the Colorado River, it’s going to behoove them to measure,” Light said.
Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
This story originally appeared on Fresh Water News, an independent, non-partisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Its editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org.
Maps, charts, graphics and other data visualizations can be a fantastic tool for explaining water issues. Data visualization is one of the types of journalism that The Water Desk is focusing on as we seek to strengthen water-related coverage. In this episode, we talk with Water Desk consultant Geoff McGhee about some of the ways that data visualizations can help journalists tell stories about water. We discuss four dashboards on our website, waterdesk.org, that allow users to track and analyze data on drought, precipitation, the snowpack and major dams and reservoirs.
Episode highlights
Click links to cue the podcast episode
Introducing “Water Buffs”
Water Desk director Mitch Tobin introduces the first episode of our podcast, available in video and audio wherever you get your podcasts. Starts at 0:00
Data viz and water
Water Desk consultant Geoff McGhee talks about some of the ways that data visualizations can help journalists tell stories about water.
If you’re interested in appearing on the show, please contact Water Desk Director Mitch Tobin at mitchtobin@colorado.edu. If you’d like to share your comments and questions, you can reach us at waterdesk@colorado.edu, or on Twitter and Facebook.
The snowpack that 40 million people rely on for water supplies was supposed to provide a bounty this year. Instead, much of it melted away fast and early — part of a long-term trend associated with climate change.
Climate change is making traditional methods for predicting stream flows from melting mountain snowpack less reliable. But new approaches can help. These include mapping of snow depth and the water content of snow from the air — an approach used to create the map above of Colorado’s Maroon Bells in the spring of 2019. (Credit: Jeffrey Deems/ASO, NSIDC)
By Jenna Sampson
After a decent ski season was cut short by the coronavirus pandemic, Colorado’s snowpack melted away with breathtaking speed, and drought expanded dramatically.
Leading into winter, soils were already thirsty. After a snowy few months, unusual warmth set in, causing the snowmelt season to come on early and fast. Then Colorado experienced its ninth driest spring in 140 years of record-keeping.
The upshot: As of early August, 100 percent of the state was abnormally dry or in some stage of drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Beyond the water supply impacts that farmers and cities might experience in coming months, scientists say that what we saw this spring offers a taste of things to come — thanks to climate change.
And that’s not just a warmer, drier future. Climate change may already be making traditional ways of managing drought and allocating water less reliable. Among these management tools are ones used by water managers to predict what conditions will be like in just a matter of months.
A comparison of images acquired by NASA’s Terra satellite shows how much less snowpack was left in the Colorado Rockies on June 8 of this year compared to the same date last year. It’s a comparison of extremes, with much higher than average snowpack in 2019 and significantly below average now. (Credit: Images via NASA Worldview; animation by Tom Yulsman)
The spring of 2020 offers a telling example. Thanks to the warm and dry conditions, much less water rushed into many of Colorado’s streams and rivers than water managers had forecast at the end of the winter using their traditional tools, which depend heavily on measuring the snowpack in the mountains.
Thankfully, conservation and water stored in reservoirs can see us through relatively short periods of scarcity. But over the longer run, we could find ourselves at risk of seeing our water safety net drop dangerously low.
“Global warming fundamentally changes the hydrological cycle,” says Brad Udall, senior water and climate scientist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center. “Anything water managers relied on in the 20th century is not going to be applicable in the 21st.”
The reality on the ground
With the notable exception of the particularly dry Upper Rio Grande River Basin, most reservoir levels in Colorado were near average as of June 1, according to the most recent water supply outlook report from the Natural Resources Conservation Service. That was thanks mostly to an impressive bounty of snow during the winter and spring of 2019.
That banked water is already proving useful to Northern Water, a public agency that manages an elaborate system for collecting water on the wetter western side of the Colorado Rockies, and piping it under the mountains for use by farmers, cities and industries on the drier eastern side. Farmers in particular rely on that water to meet the needs of their late-season crops. But with the warm and dry spring, they needed extra water earlier in the season than usual.
“This project is about delivering late season water so crops can create full maturity and full yield by end of summer,” says Jeff Stahla, public information officer at Northern Water. But that’s not what has happened so far in 2020. “Farmers were starting to take their water earlier than they wanted to this year because of lack of storms.”
Northern Water’s mission “is different from others in the American West,” he notes. It is “to smooth out the peaks and valleys of the hydrology of northeastern Colorado.”
That mission is particularly important in years like this one, when runoff projections were off across much of Colorado. For example, in early March, forecasters predicted that the Upper Colorado River would swell with enough snowmelt to run at 104 percent of normal during the spring runoff season. Fast forward to early June, and the forecast had to be slashed to just 72 percent of normal.
Further downstream, the runoff flowing through the Colorado River into Lake Powell has fallen way short of expectations, which were pessimistic to begin with. In May, forecasters predicted that river flows into the giant reservoir would total just 65 percent of average through late July. As of the second week of the month, however, the actual inflow into Lake Powell, which serves as a critical hydrological savings bank for 40 million people, was much worse: just 54 percent of average.
Glen Canyon Dam with the bathtub ring above Lake Powell showing the level it can reach when full. Credit: Mitch Tobin, The Water Desk
That’s been a familiar story over the past 20 years. Stubborn drought in the Colorado River Basin, plus the need to send water to Lake Mead, its sibling reservoir downstream, have left Powell significantly depleted. On July 10, the reservoir was at just 53 percent of capacity, with outflows surpassing inflows.
With so little water, if you were taking a dip there in July, you’d be swimming 90 feet below the surface level of the lake when it is at full capacity. And you’d be looking up at the now infamous “bathtub ring,” a conspicuous white band lining the surrounding cliffs that marks where the water once stood.
Luckily, the epic snowpack of the 2018/2019 winter left the state of Colorado with that nice safety net. Even so, going into last winter, unusual warmth and lack of precipitation caused soils to get extremely dry, part of a trend highlighted by water experts like Udall. This is one of the main factors that is making it increasingly difficult for forecasters to accurately predict how much water would make its way into the system instead of being sucked up by thirsty trees and soil, or evaporating into the warm air.
With above average temperatures continuing to be seen in Colorado and many other parts of the West this summer, the same pre-winter dry-out that occurred last year could well be repeated this year — with impacts possibly extending into next.
Over the longer run, many studies have shown that climate change is already altering the water cycle in the West. For example, annual maximum snowpack in a significant portion of the Western United States — equivalent in size to South Carolina — declined by an average of around 40 percent over the 34 years between 1982 and 2016. In many parts of the West, warming temperatures have also raised the snowline, where precipitation turns from rain to snow, leaving more soil exposed. The snow that does accumulate is also tending to melt out more quickly as spring temperatures arrive earlier due to climate change. The upshot: more drying of soils.
One factor affecting parts of the southern Rockies in particular is a phenomenon called the Hadley cell, a circulation pattern arising in the tropics that affects weather far afield. As part of the phenomenon, air heats up and rises near the equator and flows northwards and southwards high above Earth’s surface. It then descends in the subtropics, in the process warming and drying areas at the surface and thereby helping to sustain deserts like the Sahara and Mohave. From these regions, the air finally returns toward the equator near the surface to complete a giant loop.
Under the influence of climate change, the planet’s Hadley cells are now expanding poleward, according to Udall. This is in turn helping to shift storm tracks northward, and drying out increasingly higher latitude regions — southern Colorado among them.
“You should be nervous if you’re in Durango,” Udall says.
Southwestern Colorado’s East Sentinel Fire burns about 17 miles west of the city of Durango in hot and dry conditions on June 15, 2020, as seen by the Sentinel 2 satellite. (Credit: modified Copernicus Sentinel data processed by Tom Yulsman)
In that part of the state, unusually warm and dry conditions this spring have raised risks of wildfire. In fact, lightning striking a dry pinyon-pine forest near Durango on June 15 sparked the East Canyon Fire. Six days later, it had spread across nearly 3,000 acres, and forced the evacuation of over 35 homes. Luckily, calmer winds allowed firefighters to bring it under control, though nearly 10 new fires were kicked up in the Durango area after more lightning hit the dry region at the end of the month.
For a time this past winter, snowpack in the southern river basins of Colorado was running more or less at average. But it peaked about 10 days earlier than the historical average and melted out rapidly under record-high temperatures in late April. Not surprisingly, these areas of Colorado are the very regions now in the red zone of extreme drought.
To the north, the Upper Colorado River Basin’s snowpack actually peaked later than normal this year. But once again, warm and dry conditions then took a toll: The snowpack went into freefall during April.
Thick snowpack no longer promises brimming reservoirs
Understandably, many people look at the health of the winter snowpack and think the ensuing flows in rivers will be directly proportional, with big powder days a harbinger of an exciting whitewater rafting season to come. However, if the snowpack peaks and melts early, there is more time for exposed land to become dry, which means thirstier plants and soil, which means less water making its way into streams and rivers.
Of course, there are still plenty of big storms and anomalies, like 2018/2019’s bountiful snowpack. But as we saw this past winter, it didn’t save us from the broader, longer-term trend of warming and drying. And that trend can be self-reinforcing.
“Dry soil from one year is a memory in the system for the next year,” Udall says.
A comparison vegetation moisture values centered on Gunnison, Colorado, as measured by the Sentinel 2 satellite in July of 2019 and this year. Red colors indicate drier conditions. (Credit: Copernicus Sentinel data processed by Tom Yulsman)
In his view, what we’re seeing now in Colorado and much of the American Southwest is likely not just a temporary drought that will be eased with more precipitation. The dramatic impact that excessive warmth has had on the crucial springtime flows of runoff in the region’s rivers is part of a phenomenon he and other experts are calling “aridification.”
This is layered on top of the natural ups and downs of climate, in which periods with a dearth of precipitation come and go from year to year. But thanks to the huge amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide we’ve already emitted into the atmosphere, temperatures will continue to rise in coming years. With that in mind, expectations should shift toward a new baseline of increasing dryness in the already arid West, Udall says.
In fact, a study published in the journal Science this April found that human-caused global warming seems to have pushed the southwestern portion of North America — a region encompassing most of Colorado — into a multi-decadal megadrought, the severity of which hasn’t been seen since the 1500s. Without global warming, the drought, which began in 2000, would likely have been only moderately severe, according to the study.
Aridification, and the possibility of surprises in store as climate change progresses, should prompt us to change how we manage water, Udall argues. In the Colorado River Basin, for example, water management plans typically stay in place for about two decades, and then they get revisited. “I think we’re going to have to revisit these plans more often, and expect them to change in ways we can’t foresee,” he says.
Drought predictability is melting away
If this past winter and spring has shown us anything it is that relying mostly on snowpack to predict drought and water shortages arising from it can lead forecasters astray. And new findings by Ben Livneh, a University of Colorado hydrology researcher, and a colleague show this problem is likely to get worse as warming continues, causing snowpack to shrivel and drought predictability to melt away with it.
The study, published in Nature Climate Change in April, found that if emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide continue at high levels, by mid-century forecasters will have a much tougher time predicting seasonal drought across nearly 70 percent of the Mountain West, where snowmelt dominates the water supply. That’s for a simple reason: With more warming, there will be less and less snowpack, and thus less of the stuff essential to the current way of making predictions.
Because of its particularly tall mountains, Colorado likely will fare better than the Pacific Northwest, where the lower elevation and proximity to the ocean puts it at risk of much faster declines in snowpack, according to Livneh. But if emissions continue at high levels, by the end of the century even lofty areas like Colorado could see significant declines in snowpack that would degrade forecasters’ ability to predict drought. Water managers can try to do better in coming years by updating their toolbox with such things as measurements of soil moisture, rainfall and temperature. Satellite observations of snowpack at mountaintops — where ground measurements often are just too difficult to make, and where snow will persist longer — could also prove useful..
Another new approach has already been rolled out in Colorado and California: airborne measurements of the depth and water content of snow in the mountains. In the current approach, relatively sparse measurements of snowpack taken on the ground are compared with the historical record to predict runoff. The basic idea is that since certain snowpack conditions produced a given amount of runoff in the past, they’ll do so again now. But this isn’t working as well as it once did because climate change has, in effect, changed the rules of the game. According to Jeffery Deems, a research scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center, and co-founder of Airborne Snow Observatories, measuring snowpack from the air provides a much more complete picture of snowpack in, say, a particular watershed. Forecasters can then use that information along with with other data to model how much runoff is likely to occur, providing a more reliable prediction.
With warming, drying and earlier melt-out of snowpack, water managers are already having to grapple with significant change. Stahla of Northern Water is confident in the ability of his program to adapt — and also to heed the warning these trends are offering about the future.
As he puts it, “If you’re not concerned then you’re probably not looking at the data closely enough.”
Jenna Sampson is a freelance environmental journalist and contributor to The Water Desk. You can find her on Twitter @jennadawn. Tom Yulsman contributed to this story.
The Water Desk has launched a new podcast with in-depth conversations about water issues.
Water Buffs will feature interviews with leaders and experts who can explain the challenges confronting our water resources—and potential solutions. We’ll be talking to journalists, scientists, advocates, policymakers, water users and other stakeholders.
The podcast will also include a regular series, Water Words, that explains important terminology in the water world so that our audience can learn more about these critical topics.
How we chose the name
We chose the name Water Buffs for three reasons:
The podcast will focus on interviews with leading figures in the field, a group that’s often referred to as “water buffaloes”
Our show will feature conversations with experts (aka “buffs”) and we hope to help our audience “buff up” on their own water knowledge
We’re based at the University of Colorado Boulder, where our mascot is a buffalo, students are nicknamed “buffs,” and the official cheer is “Go Buffs!”
You can learn more about our podcast and view or download episodes at waterdesk.org/podcast.
We’re creating both audio and video versions of the podcast. You can find Water Buffs on YouTube, Vimeo, Stitcher, iTunes and other platforms.
Interested in appearing? Get in touch.
If you’re interested in appearing on the show, please contact Water Desk Director Mitch Tobin at mitchtobin@colorado.edu.
Special thanks to the executive producer and co-manager of the Water Buffs podcast, Hannah Leigh Myers, and our graphic designer and co-developer Geoff McGhee.
In our first episode, we talk to Geoff about how journalists and others can use maps, graphics, charts and other data visualizations to tell stories about water.
In our first Water Buffs podcast episode, we talk to data visualization expert @mcgeoff about how journalists and others can use maps, charts and graphics to tell stories about water.https://t.co/aUWMldfXfv
Should Colorado River water be used to grow alfalfa or subdivisions in the Phoenix metropolitan area? A pending water sale pits communities along the river against those of Queen Creek, population 50,000 and is setting the stage for future battles over the world’s most precious resource.
Producer/Editor: Vanessa Barchfield
Videographer: Jeff Landers, Martín Rubio
Editor: Mya Hoffman-Long
This story was supported by a grant from The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative based at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
