The mountain snowpack that supplies a significant amount of California’s water got an incredible boost from recent powerful storms and is outpacing the state’s wettest season on record, state water officials said Wednesday.
But its too soon to know if the winter will be a drought-buster, they said.
The New Year’s Atmospheric River storms of 2023 have abated and catchments across the State are draining as exemplified by continuing baseflows through their hydrograph recession limbs. River flows are still elevated, but releases have been incrementally curtailed and stage levels continue to drop.
Despite early positive signs, however, the reality of what this storm (or series of storms) brought in terms of drought relief is made eminently clear by reviewing various data sources.
California water agencies that rely on the Colorado River today proposed a modeling framework for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to evaluate as it considers actions to help stabilize reservoir elevations and protect critical infrastructure to ensure the Colorado River system can continue to support 40 million people, nearly 6 million acres of agriculture, and Tribes across seven states and portions of Mexico.
Dueling plans for how to save the fast-drying Colorado River have been submitted by California and six other states to federal authorities, who have made clear they may impose draconian cuts if consensus is not reached regionally on deep reductions. That agreement could be hard to come by.
California swung hard at six other Western states late Tuesday, submitting its own proposal for more than 3 million acre feet in reductions — both from current and future agreements — if necessary from the river’s dwindling reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
California released a plan Tuesday detailing how Western states reliant on the Colorado River should save more water. It came a day after the six other states in the river basin made a competing proposal.
In a letter to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, California described how states could conserve between 1 million and nearly 2 million acre feet of water through new cuts based on the elevation of Lake Mead, a key reservoir.
The statewide Sierra Nevada snowpack — the source of nearly one-third of California’s water supply — is at its highest level since 1995, boosting hopes that an end to the drought is near, but also raising concerns that a few warm spring storms could melt it too early and trigger major flooding.
Not since Toy Story packed movie theaters, Steve Young led the 49ers to their fifth Super Bowl win, and gasoline cost $1.28 a gallon has there been so much snow in California’s most famous mountain range at the end of January.
The heavy snow blanketing the Rocky Mountains this winter is a welcome respite for the shrinking Colorado River.
Yes, but: Climate experts say it still falls short from saturating the state’s drought-ridden reservoirs.
The interior of the plane looked like a cross between a private luxury jet and a space mission control room.
The Gulfstream IV cruised at 43,000 feet, high above a seemingly peaceful layer of thick clouds that stretched to the horizon.
Crew members in blue jumpsuits stared at computer screens that revealed their hidden target miles below: a powerful atmospheric river that was churning across the Pacific Ocean toward California, bearing torrential rains and fierce winds.
The seven states that depend on the Colorado River have missed a Jan. 31 federal deadline for reaching a regionwide consensus on how to sharply reduce water use, raising the likelihood of more friction as the West grapples with how to take less supplies from the shrinking river.
In a bid to sway the process after contentious negotiations reached an impasse, six of the seven states gave the federal government a last-minute proposal outlining possible water cuts to help prevent reservoirs from falling to dangerously low levels, presenting a unified front while leaving out California, which uses the single largest share of the river.
With the federal government poised to force Western states to change how they manage the alarming shortfall in Colorado River water, there is one constituency with a growing interest in the river’s fate that’s little known to some: Wall Street investors.
Private investment firms are showing a growing interest in an increasingly scarce natural resource in the American West: water in the Colorado River, a joint investigation by CBS News and The Weather Channel has found. For some of the farmers and cities that depend on the river as a lifeline, that interest is concerning.
