Visible and invisible signs
On the long tails of drought and change.
One of the more frustrating parts of writing and communication generally is selecting an appropriate timescale. We often enter in the middle. We rely on sign posts — meetings, reports, decisions, and deadlines — to help explain otherwise noisy worlds. This is not a bad thing. To the contrary, structure helps direct and organize traffic. We’d be lost otherwise, awash in too much information.
It also necessarily constrains our view. In the context of drought and water shortages (and the compounding nature of both), we tend to gravitate to frames that have clear beginnings and ends. Drought or not. Shortage or not. In the “not” times, we believe all is well. But these events — and policy solutions to address them — often unravel gradually, spreading out in many ways, at different speeds and directions. Many indicators, many of them invisible.
Most of the Western U.S. faces dry conditions, according to the drought monitor, and all parts of the West face a snow drought, with low snowpack records in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. The linked maps are helpful. They offer a snapshot of the conditions. And still, drought is a cumulative process not a binary one. Drought has not one but many definitions that incorporate multiple datasets and observations.
Water shortages similarly unfold on timescales with long tails — something I kept in mind this week while thinking about cuts on the Colorado River, often described as a “slow-moving train wreck,” one in which users keep agreeing on stopgap policies to slow down the train and lay slightly more track, but do neither to the degree required to avert a crisis. It’s been more than two decades since 2002, when the U.S. Secretary of Interior declared an “era of limits,” speaking before Colorado River users.
It’s true elsewhere too, and it’s particularly true of groundwater, where the invisibility of aquifers makes it all too easy to miss the less visible impacts of drought or the signs of water shortages — until there is a crisis and we enter in the middle.
With that, some indicators I’m thinking about this month, as I clear out my tabs.
Indicators, trends and more:
What happens to priority and water access when a changing climate affects the way streamflow is distributed over time? This is the question researchers from the Colorado School of Mines ask in a new Nature Water paper. Interestingly, they find that changes in the distribution of streamflow can affect water access under the West’s “first in time, first in right” priority system.
Coverage on this from The Colorado Sun and the press release for the paper.
The cost of cutting back: Who pays for conservation in a crisis? States in the Colorado River Basin might be nowhere near a long-term deal on how to share a shrinking river, but many users agree on the need for federal funding. Last week, water users, Tribes, conservation groups, and governments from across the basin wrote to Congress calling for a $2 billion infusion of funding and a long-term funding mechanism to address “structural and ongoing” issues in the basin.1
A copy of the letter can be found here.
Back in the Biden administration, the federal government allocated $4 billion to fund Colorado River conservation, but much of that was frozen in 2025.
Nevada is punting on draft curtailment order, for now: Across the West, states are figuring out how to manage the impact of groundwater overuse on streamflow in the context of a water law that often treated the two as separate, disconnected sources. In 2024, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled that regulators had the ability to regulate the two sources conjunctively. Last year, the state tried to implement a draft order on the Humboldt River that would have required pumping reductions.
There was significant backlash, concerns over potential litigation, and concerns about the modeling used to quantify reductions. Now a new top water official is putting the effort on hold, The Nevada Independent reports. It’s a story, like many water stories, about the collision of law, science, and politics — as well as the compounding nature of groundwater impacts over time.
For my Nevada readers who want to dig deeper, the U.S. Geological Survey released a long-awaited professional paper this week modeling streamflow capture from groundwater pumping in the Middle Humboldt River Basin.
Proposed cuts to a critical safe and affordable drinking water program: About 600,000 Californians lack access to safe and reliable drinking water, and the Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience program (SAFER) provides key funding to help communities close the gap. Now a change in a funding source for the program — the state’s carbon market — could mean cuts. CalMatters reports.
Watching data centers and water (more specifically, water-energy tradeoffs):
Fish recovery and ecosystems in a year of record low streamflows: The effects of dry conditions are already reshaping flows in the Upper Colorado River Basin.
Aspen Journalism, earlier this month, reported on challenges maintaining habitat in the 15-mile reach, critical fish habitat for endangered species near the confluence with the Gunnison River. At the same time, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is releasing more water to boost levels at Lake Powell, the timing of which could help to benefit endangered fish.
More than 100 dams removed in 2025: “Last year, more sections of the country’s rivers were reconnected thanks to dam removals than at any other time in history, according to the nonprofit group American Rivers,” the New York Times reported. “In 2025, more than 100 dams were dismantled in 30 states, reconnecting around 4,900 miles of waterways, including 156 miles of a branch of the Juniata River that are now reconnected thanks to the removal of Bedford’s two dams.”
Does anyone know if there exists a full accounting of the money spent? I was trying (not too hard) earlier today to find this and came against dead ends. I will try more later.
To me the solution to the SW water problem is simple: stop putting so much acreage under cattle feed, namely alfalfa and hay growing under blistering desert conditions and taking half the water, directly and indirectly, of CA and AZ. The water rights to those ag areas were allocated in a different time (low population), different climate, and under overly optimistic hydrological projections. But what about the landowners? One possibility is to enact imminent domain and buy the farmland out, then have the government or some quasi public utilities install solar panels on the land as a way of paying for the land purchase. To make up the slack in feed supply we could end the Bush era ethanol industry which is no longer needed and return that Midwest cropland to productive use.