Wyoming, the Cowboy State, is at the other end of the Colorado River from the Imperial Valley. Its Green River starts high on the western slopes of the Wind River Mountains, and as the largest tributary to the Colorado River, plays a major role in sending us water 1400 miles away.
Snowpack levels crucial to water supplies in the Colorado River basin have been rising over the past week as storms hit the Rocky Mountains. Dec. 27 measurements of 102% snowpack in the region — just above normal — had risen to 142% as of today in the Upper Colorado River Basin. That week-to-week change is good news but demonstrates the volatility of snowpack levels.
All good stories start with a question. So here are five questions for journalists to consider as the record-breaking accumulation of greenhouse gases continues into the opening days of 2023. Climate change, of course, can’t be divided into parts. The answers to these questions, however you devise them, may start small and specific and then, like climate change itself, to borrow the title of a popular 2022 film, illustrate how it is “everything everywhere all at once.”
The grass beneath the palm trees at the Foothills has no function other than to look lush and inviting for people driving up to the gated community’s entrance. The homeowners’ association there, like many that govern such developments dating to the 1980s and 1990s, was still sprinkling Colorado River water on about 50,000 square feet of turf this year.
Eight of the top 10 warmest years on record occurred in the last decade. The snowline where rain turns to powder continues to move uphill. The dry season is longer than ever as wildfires ravage forests and communities. It’s a bleak outlook for the state of the Sierra Nevada snowpack, not to mention our planet as a whole.
Deep uncertainty looms over the Colorado River and the 40 million people who depend on it for their water supply as the basin enters a critical year that could determine its future stability. Plagued by decades of overuse and human-caused climate change, demand for the river’s water has vastly outpaced its supply.
Nevada water managers have submitted a plan for cutting diversions by 500,000 acre-feet in a last-ditch effort to shore up flows on the Colorado River before low water levels cause critical problems at Glen Canyon and Hoover dams. But the Silver State’s plan targets cuts in Utah and the river’s other Upper Basin states, not in Nevada, whose leaders contend it already is doing what it can to reduce reliance on the depleted river system that provides water to 40 million in the West.
The Colorado River Basin is in the midst of a sustainability crisis. Climate change and severe drought, coupled with historic overallocation of the river, have caused water users to rapidly drain the system’s major reservoirs to their lowest levels since construction.
On a crisp day this fall I drove southeast from Grand Junction, Colorado, into the Uncompahgre Valley, a rich basin of row crops and hayfields. A snow line hung like a bowl cut around the upper cliffs of the Grand Mesa, while in the valley some farmers were taking their last deliveries of water, sowing winter wheat and onions. I turned south at the farm town of Delta onto Route 348, a shoulder-less two-lane road lined with irrigation ditches and dent corn still hanging crisp on their browned stalks. The road crossed the Uncompahgre River, and it was thin, nearly dry.
A state board tasked with vetting water supply augmentation proposals for Arizona on Tuesday passed a nonbinding resolution in support of a potentially massive seawater desalination plant in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez. A partnership led by Israeli desalination specialists IDE Technologies pitched the multibillion-dollar plan to the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority of Arizona’s board, saying it could replace or complement declining Colorado River water that flows through the Central Arizona Project’s canal. The plant would remove salt from seawater and pump it north into the canal, where it would flow through Maricopa, Pinal and Pima counties.
