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Extended warm weather across the Colorado River basin may reduce the amount of water delivered during the spring runoff to just a third of normal, according to federal forecasters.

Modeling released late last week showed the river system on track to deliver a scant 2.3 million acre-feet to Lake Powell, one of the river system’s largest reservoirs. That’s 36% of the median of 6.4 million acre-feet recorded between 1991 and 2020. If the forecast comes true, it would be the fifth-lowest inflow to Lake Powell since the reservoir’s establishment in 1963, according to the National Weather Service’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center.

The sluggish Colorado River negotiations have entered a new phase: long and fiery letter-writing.

Politicians, water negotiators and environmental groups recently submitted hundreds of pages of comments on the Interior Department’s playbook for how to manage the waterway. There are currently five possible options to deal with the river in the absence of a deal between the seven states in the basin.

You might appreciate snowpack as something to sled, ski, or snowboard on. But beyond the slopes, vast masses of snow melt as winter turns to spring, feeding rivers and streams, which go on to hydrate towns and cities and crops. We’re talking incredible amounts of water: California, for instance, gets 30 percent of its supply from the snowpack in its Sierra Nevada mountains.

But across the American west, that bounty is in trouble as the climate quickly changes: The region is currently in the grip of a severe snow drought, as more precipitation falls as rain. At the same time, higher temperatures are desiccating the landscape, fueling massive wildfires once all that snow melts away. Not helping matters is a long history of fire suppression — quickly stamping out blazes has allowed dry vegetation to accumulate, adding yet more fuel to the flames.