If you’re studying this on the East Coast, congratulations on the hotter climate you’re lastly getting this week. It was chilly and snowy for some time there. Right here within the West, we want we’d been in your sneakers. Spare a thought for the tens of hundreds of thousands of us who stay on the opposite facet of the continent, the place a disaster is unfolding.
In Colorado, the place I stay and grew up, this winter has been particularly heat and dry. Final 12 months closed with the warmest December within the historical past of recordkeeping. It was 8.9 levels hotter than the common from 1991 to 2020, and the warmest of all in a report that goes again to the late nineteenth century. Over this previous weekend, my neighbors and my household walked with our canines and our children in T-shirts and shorts, as a result of it was within the mid-60s in Colorado Springs. About 60 miles north, my household in Denver noticed a brand new report excessive of 68 levels—on February 15.
However temperatures will not be the one motive this winter is a disaster. This 12 months, our snowpack is among the many lowest ever measured, which suggests it gained’t be sufficient to fill the rivers which can be born in our mountains, which feed reservoirs and water farms from right here to Los Angeles. Snow is lastly coming to the mountains this week, however we nonetheless can not keep away from one of many worst water years in fashionable historical past. The West is already experiencing the worst drought we have now seen in 1,200 years, as our junior senator, John Hickenlooper, jogged my memory in an e mail over the weekend. Colorado politicians need to be attuned to those dynamics: “The snowpack is just about as giant as all of our reservoirs mixed. That’s why winters like this one are so terrifying,” he wrote. Drought can imply financial catastrophe.
Hickenlooper, who was additionally the state’s governor and the mayor of Denver, shouldn’t be a person given to hyperbole. It truly is that dire. Except a variety of snow falls quickly, Colorado’s setting and financial system will take an enormous hit. Ski resorts are shedding cash now. Within the spring, rivers that normally supply waist-high whitewater rapids and fishing swimming pools will as an alternative be a trickle; in the summertime, farmers will lose peach crops. Hydrologists, hearth scientists, and local weather researchers are bracing for summer time too; their spectrum of fear ranges from concern to precise panic.
“It’s as dangerous as you suppose it’s,” Russ Schumacher, the Colorado state climatologist, instructed me. On prime of the continued, decades-long drought within the area, all of Colorado is in a snow drought too. The quantity of water saved within the snowpack is the bottom it’s been at this level in winter since no less than 1987, when complete measurements started, he mentioned. Going again to older information, a few of which date from the Mud Bowl, the 2025–26 water 12 months is the third-worst ever measured. Within the two worse years, snowpack measured about 40 to 42 % of common at this level in winter; this 12 months, Colorado is sitting round 58 % of median general, and decrease in some areas.
Climatologists say {that a} weak La Niña sample within the Pacific is partly guilty, parking a high-pressure “heartbreak ridge” farther east than ordinary, which regularly pushes moisture away from the mountains. However the abysmal snowpack can be inflicting a nasty suggestions loop, permitting the mountains to heat greater than ordinary. The sample may lastly break this week, and “we positively have time to make up floor,” Allie Mazurek, a climatologist on the Colorado Local weather Middle, instructed me. However she additionally cautioned that “at this stage, it’s trying nearly inconceivable for us to get again to a median snowpack.”
Schumacher’s predecessor, the longtime state climatologist Nolan Doesken, used to say that Colorado’s snowmelt is effectively behaved. Rain is available in a flash and is gone simply as rapidly, however we all know the place snow falls, the place it should lie in wait, and which rivers it should feed months later. Flakes accumulate on chilly floor, and when the Rockies keep chilly the way in which they need to, the snow stays for a lot of months. And the encircling air stays colder with snowpack than with out it. This winter, temperatures are hovering 10 to 12 levels above regular in northwestern Colorado—temperatures that area wouldn’t be seeing if the bottom had been coated in snow, Mazurek mentioned.
Western water displays use a metric known as snow water equal, which is simply what it feels like, to estimate how a lot water will circulate into rivers when the snow melts. Since 1987, the Snowpack Telemetry Community, SNOTEL, has measured snowpack by weighing the snow that falls at lots of of stations throughout the West, together with greater than 100 presently energetic ones in Colorado. Different measurements are taken by hikers who snowshoe as much as designated spots and measure the snowpack by hand. Local weather scientists have been doing this for many years. Final week, the snow water equal within the Colorado River basin was tied for the bottom ever recorded, in keeping with Brad Udall, a senior water scientist at Colorado State College and an skilled on the Colorado River.
That snowpack varieties the headwaters of rivers together with the Colorado, the Rio Grande, and the Arkansas. And the Colorado River feeds the 2 largest reservoirs in the USA: Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Each reservoirs are critically low and have been for years: Powell is about 25 % full, and Mead is at about 34 %. If Powell’s water stage drops one other 40 or so toes, which it may this 12 months, there gained’t be sufficient water to generate hydroelectric energy at Glen Canyon Dam. Water managers are beginning to fear about “useless pool” too, wherein the lake will get too low to let water circulate by Glen Canyon towards Lake Mead; they’re more likely to scale back water circulate out of Powell this 12 months to keep away from it.
In many of the Colorado River’s higher basin—in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming—water shouldn’t be collected in lots of reservoirs; as an alternative, it’s diverted out to hundreds of small areas, from streams to irrigation ditches. And “this 12 months, there simply isn’t going to be any water in these rivers. Or there shall be water, however as an alternative of 12 weeks or 16 weeks of water, it will likely be 4 weeks of water,” Udall instructed me. “Underneath western water regulation, individuals can principally fully dry these rivers up.”
That is dangerous timing, as a result of Colorado and the opposite basin states are presently failing to renegotiate key components of the more-than-century-old Colorado River Compact, which expire later this 12 months. Together with seven states, the river-management settlement contains the federal Bureau of Reclamation, 30 tribal nations, and Mexico, and controls how the river flows into and out of Lakes Powell and Mead. The states missed a significant deadline on February 14, which implies that the Bureau of Reclamation will as an alternative impose its personal plan—one which not one of the states are more likely to be proud of. In Colorado, no less than, some residents are involved that the Trump administration will punish the solidly blue state by merely giving extra water to, say, Arizona, which Donald Trump gained in 2024. That is removed from an irrational fear. In late December, Trump vetoed funding for a pipeline, already beneath development with bipartisan help, that may convey water from a reservoir to rural communities in southeastern Colorado. The combat over the Colorado River may form up in related trend, pitting state towards state. (In response to a request for remark, a Division of the Inside spokesperson pointed me to a press launch wherein Secretary Doug Burgum mentioned that the division had “listened to each state’s perspective” and {that a} “honest compromise with shared accountability stays inside attain.”)
Additional sooner or later, the consequences of water reductions will spill by the western financial system. Agriculture, water recreation corresponding to fishing and river rafting, and full mountain ecosystems—each environmental and financial—will falter. For now, although, we’re worrying about our bushes budding six weeks too early, and pouring buckets of water round their trunks to maintain them hydrated within the heat. We’re updating our hearth checklists and go luggage throughout red-flag warnings: One went up yesterday as I used to be engaged on this story. Winter hearth watches are irregular, however we’re rising all too accustomed to them. And we’re checking the snow forecast each day.
