Heading toward a terrible peak snowpack
What it means for the Colorado River and the water supply.
Hello, and welcome to Invisible Waters.
My apologies here for the radio silence the past few weeks. What happened? Been juggling several things last month and was focused on writing about the Colorado River shortly after the missed Feb. 14 deadline. I started a post on the river + governance but, as I was refining it in free moments, I found myself struggling with it, especially as the situation is still unfolding. There’s a lot to say but I felt like it was hard to say anything too definitive right now. I want to write something, and I also need more time to think, observe, synthesize, and sift through a couple of ideas. In the meantime, I’ll share below some links in the post below.
The pause was not all for nothing. It got me to step back and ask an important question: What is the big picture? Clearly, cutting back has gotten harder as the cuts have become increasingly difficult to share and have become increasingly present. But this is a climate story as much as anything else. What happens, at least this year, could very well be dictated by the hydrology.
And… the snowpack in much of the Western U.S. is abysmal. Meteorological winter ended two weeks ago, and we are two-ish weeks away from hitting what typically is peak snowpack for the season. It’s bad news for water and wildfire across the West, especially in the Colorado River Basin, Northern California, and the Great Basin.
(For more technical details here, climatologist Daniel Swain held office hours on his Weather West YouTube channel Tuesday to dissect what’s going on and the drivers here. I highly recommend checking them out, and supporting his valuable work!)
First, I’ll start with the maps and charts, which tell the story more simply than I could (data as of March 11). Keep in mind, as Swain notes, these products compare this year to 1991-2020, a period that already accounts for snowpack loss due to climate change.
The Westwide Snow Water Equivalent Map
Upper Colorado Region Snow Water Equivalent Chart
Great Basin (Nevada, Utah, Great Salt Lake) Chart
Rio Grande Region Chart
California Basins (Sacramento + San Joaquin + Walker + Truckee)
**Snowpack is still below average across California, but parts of the state are doing better, especially in the eastern Sierra, where the Walker, Carson and Truckee flow into western Nevada/Great Basin. Since there’s some variability, here’s four charts:
Warmest Winter on Record
One last map, which Swain and others have highlighted, comes from NOAA showing that this winter (Dec. 2025 - Feb. 2026) was the warmest in 131 years across the West. Swain, in his office hours, noted that there is natural variability, but climate change is the “anchor” beneath the “noise.” He likened it to “bad luck on top of bad behavior,” with variability adding an exclamation point. And more record heat is on the way.
Breaking it All Down
How the snowpack runs off and what it means for the water supply depends on where you are, taking into consideration other parameters like soil moisture and the overall precipitation. The details and geographic particulars do matter quite a bit here.
But in the Colorado River Basin, the awful snowpack this year will add pressure to an already tense situation. Streamflow into Lake Powell is predicted to be at 36% of the average for April to July, and about 52% for the water year. That, as Brandon Loomis reports in the Arizona Republic, would be “lowest April-July boost for Lake Powell since the disastrous year of 2002 firmly entrenched this age of megadrought.”
The hydrology comes at a time of a management crisis on the river. The states failed to meet a(n extended) federal deadline to develop a consensus plan to share cuts on the river, a planning process with a scope that got slowly whittled down the past few years as attention turned toward avoiding short-term crises. Now there’s another one.
In the absence of a state-led consensus, the federal government has finally pledged to step in and impose its own cuts in a serious way, laying out earlier this year a menu of options (without saying which course may be the preferred option), all sort of cobbled-together amalgams of existing plans and none universally loved, or liked, by anyone.
I guess the states don’t agree on much but can at least agree that they don’t want the federal government to tell them what to do. In a (perverse?) way, that actually could be read as a signal of hope that maybe a real federal threat will incentivize the states to come to some kind of short-term deal to preserve some of the architecture in current operational rules for shortage, upon which many other agreements to cut back exist — how water is conserved and stored in Lake Mead, and Mexico’s shortage agreements.
A looming and real federal threat has moved the state negotiators to a deal in the past, as the Pacific Institute’s Michael Cohen wrote earlier this year.
There are still some rumblings about a short-term deal. The L.A. Times Ian James reported in a piece last month that negotiators are still talking about it. And two experienced river negotiators make an argument there is still time for consensus. Writing in the Grand Junction Sentinel, the former heads of Denver Water and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California say that “if the basin states cannot act together, the river’s future will be decided by courts, crisis, and collapse. That is a legacy no state should accept — and a future the Colorado River cannot afford.”
Given the snowpack and recent hydrology, “crisis and collapse” may come before any kind of final court ruling. Understanding this, Nevada showcased what a short-term deal might look like, as the Review-Journal’s Alan Halaly reported. “The Colorado has become a very unpredictable river. I would still hold out hope for a longer-term, multi-decadal deal, “ Nevada water chief John Entsminger explained. “But if we don’t have that, then establishing what the process will be to agree to operations and keep us out of court seems to be a prudent, adult conversation to be had.”
More than the Colorado River
The Colorado River story is important for many reasons; 40 million people in the West depend on it. But in some ways, it is representative of what a lot of watersheds face in the West. Overallocation of water rights, made worse by ignoring important science, all made worse by climate change. Finding the balance between the interests of many differently-motivated individual actors — with different risk profiles, incentives, and values — and the collective in managing a common natural resource.
This is to say that although a lot of news outlets are focused on the Colorado River, it’s important to sit with all the charts above. There is low snowpack across the West, with major social-political-ecological implications for far smaller watersheds too — for surface water and groundwater, natural and built ecosystems. In many of those, users are faced with similar problems of how to equitably divide water in a system built for a different century, with the threat of litigation looming over everyone.
And the hydrology is not going to wait out a long court battle.
Closing out my tabs, cleaning out my inbox
Lots more to write about, coming soon, but for now:
New study on the cost of data centers on water systems over the next few years —> “Small Bottle, Big Pipe: Quantifying and Addressing the Impact of Data Centers on Public Water Systems” (Han et al.)
From press release: “A study by a UC Riverside research team in collaboration with Caltech found that community waterworks across the United States will need billions of dollars in new infrastructure to meet spikes in data center water demands during peak usage. Without new water efficiencies, data center cooling systems four years from now could require 697 million to 1.45 billion gallons of additional peak water capacity per day — roughly equal to the typical daily water supply of New York City.” (emphasis mine).
Drinking water from Stanislaus County’s domestic wells can be dangerous. (Modesto Bee) “Domestic wells are a blind spot for water quality data since the state does not regulate private wells. It’s only through voluntary programs like the Valley Water Collaborative that data on these wells are gathered.”
Navajo Nation President Press Release, March 11, 2026 “WASHINGTON D.C. — Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren today called on Congress to pass S. 953, the Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Act, emphasizing the urgent need to secure safe, reliable water for thousands of tribal families.”
“Roughly a third of Navajo households still lack running water,” President Nygren said. “I grew up hauling five-gallon buckets with my mom and grandma. Today, thousands of our people still travel over 30 miles round trip to meet basic water needs. It costs on average $600 a month per family—crippling for those living below the poverty line.”
“President Nygren stressed that S. 953 represents a historic and cost-effective federal investment, benefiting both tribal communities and the American taxpayer. Under the settlement, tribes are waiving claims to Colorado River Basin water in exchange for funding to improve infrastructure and enhance Lake Powell’s reserves, achieving these goals at roughly 25 percent lower cost per tribal member than previous Indian water settlements.”
Heavily contested pumped hydro-storage project gets federal go-ahead (High Country News) “The project in the Columbia Gorge would involve tunneling through a Ḱamíłpa sacred mountain.”
How a California desalination plant could ease water shortages on the Colorado River (L.A. Times) + The Alfalfa Fallacy (Land Desk)
CA Gov. Press release (Feb. 24) “SACRAMENTO – Governor Gavin Newsom today announced the formal launch of the California Water Plan 2028, marking the start of a multi-year effort to modernize statewide water planning in response to climate-driven extremes and long-term water reliability challenges…”
“California has a statewide water supply target: 9 million acre-feet by 2040. The California Water Plan 2028 is an action-oriented blueprint that will be built by voices from across the state and designed to close the water gaps that climate change, including extreme swings between drought and floods, is widening every year.”
Warming winters are reshaping Canada’s snowpack (The Conversation)