One of these years the Colorado mountains are going to get a fraction of the snow they normally get and it's going to be a disaster for the entire southwest US. It almost happened in the winter of 2020-21, the snowpack statewide was just 30-40% of average at the end of winter. A heavy, wet, late spring storm dropped a ton of snow in the Colorado mountains in April of 2021 and saved the day, but man if that storm hadn't happened...imagine the 60 odd million people from Colorado to Mexico fighting over just a third of the normal amount of water they have to work with?
This is total fiction, Colorado as a whole has been getting way more snow per year on average in the past 15 years(except the 1990s which were very snowy) than at any time in the past 120 years, I know I live in Colorado and crunched the numbers myself. I pulled the numbers from the NOAA gov site. I have both rain and snow totals so as you can see mother nature is doing her part, its just that the population has exploded here in the past 15 years(15% or 800,000 new people since 2010) and that is what is driving down the water supply. See data by decade below:
one city on the front range that isn't even in the colorado river watershed is hardly indicative of the snow pack / snowfall inside that watershed. The inflows into lake Powell are a much better equivalent for the entire watershed and do show a decline. https://graphs.water-data.com/lakepowell/ though that doesn't show diversions / how much is being caught in upstream reservoirs. and the snotel graphs for the watersheds in the colorado basin are a much better source https://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/ftpref/support/states/CO/produ...
I chose Boulder as it has very good record keeping(and it goes way back) and is a good bellwether for the state, plus a number of key government climate labs are based here. So its a solid data point. If I had more time I would crunch numbers from a array of other cities like Breckenridge, Aspen, Colorado springs, and Grand Junction, the former two may or may not have great data from before the 1950s'.
I love the attention to detail. As another commenter pointed out, while this is perhaps true for Boulder, you'll have to acknowledge not only that Boulder experiences a rather distinct climate from the rest of Colorado, and that Boulder is hydrologically disconnected from the Colorado river basin, which is the subject of this discussion.
Furthermore, as the OP's article alludes to, snow _amount_ is only one component that contributes to water availability, particularly its timing. Larger amounts of snow that melt very fast in the spring create a novel regime that our current systems aren't well-suited to support, for example.
Indeed. Worse, it's likely that "one of these years" will turn into "most of these years" before long.
It sounds like you know this already, but the core issue here is that the 1922 agreement which divided the river's flow to various stakeholders overestimated the amount of water in the river even before the impacts of our modern warmer, drier climate.
We're left with the consequences of this overestimate mostly in the form of gridlocked renegotiation conversations as the agreement is reworked for the modern resource scenario.
Probably the biggest tl;dr here is: it's not going to be 60 million people fighting over water. It's going to be far fewer, and they're all alfalfa farmers.
> the impacts of our modern warmer, drier climate.
Nit: on average, the world will get wetter as it warms. Warmer air carries more water, so the volume of precipitation each year is likely to increase averaged over the planet.
The issue for many of these areas is that that increased precipitation is not going to be evenly distributed. The trend has been wetter areas getting wetter, drier areas getting drier, and increased warmth causing increased evaporation and less snowpack persistence into summer.
yes, certainly. The biggest impact with respect to precipitation is likely a shift in the precipitation regimes (liquid/frozen; frequency/intensity of storms, etc).
> We're left with the consequences of this overestimate mostly in the form of gridlocked renegotiation conversations as the agreement is reworked for the modern resource scenario.
Colorado (the state) is building many new reservoirs to impound water outside of the Colorado River Compact's purview. They're done hoping that California and Arizona will act responsibly, and are now going to be selfish.
