In case you are 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 footwear. Spare a thought for the tens of tens of millions of us who dwell on the opposite facet of the continent, the place a disaster is unfolding.
In Colorado, the place I dwell and grew up, this winter has been particularly heat and dry. Final yr 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 document 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 document excessive of 68 levels—on February 15.
However temperatures should not the one purpose this winter is a disaster. This yr, our snowpack is among the many lowest ever measured, which implies it received’t be sufficient to fill the rivers which might 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’t keep away from one of many worst water years in fashionable historical past. The West is already experiencing the worst drought we’ve got seen in 1,200 years, as our junior senator, John Hickenlooper, jogged my memory in an e mail over the weekend. Colorado politicians must 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, isn’t a person given to hyperbole. It truly is that dire. Until lots of snow falls quickly, Colorado’s surroundings and financial system will take an enormous hit. Ski resorts are dropping cash now. Within the spring, rivers that normally provide waist-high whitewater rapids and fishing swimming pools will as a substitute be a trickle; in the summertime, farmers will lose peach crops. Hydrologists, hearth scientists, and local weather researchers are bracing for summer season too; their spectrum of fear ranges from concern to precise panic.
“It’s as unhealthy as you assume it’s,” Russ Schumacher, the Colorado state climatologist, informed me. On high of the continuing, 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 at the very least 1987, when complete measurements started, he mentioned. Going again to older data, a few of which date from the Mud Bowl, the 2025–26 water yr is the third-worst ever measured. Within the two worse years, snowpack measured about 40 to 42 p.c of common at this level in winter; this yr, Colorado is sitting round 58 p.c of median total, and decrease in some areas.
Climatologists say {that a} weak La Niña sample within the Pacific is partly responsible, parking a high-pressure “heartbreak ridge” farther east than ordinary, which frequently pushes moisture away from the mountains. However the abysmal snowpack can be inflicting a foul suggestions loop, permitting the mountains to heat greater than ordinary. The sample might lastly break this weekand “we undoubtedly have time to make up floor,” Allie Mazurek, a climatologist on the Colorado Local weather Middle, informed me. However she additionally cautioned that “at this stage, it’s wanting nearly not possible 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 shortly, however we all know the place snow falls, the place it can lie in wait, and which rivers it can 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 have been lined in snow, Mazurek mentioned.
Western water displays use a metric referred to as snow water equal, which is simply what it seems like, to estimate how a lot water will stream into rivers when the snow melts. Since 1987, the Snowpack Telemetry Community, SNOTEL, has measured snowpack by weighing the snow that falls at tons of of stations throughout the West, together with greater than 100 at present 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 line with Brad Udall, a senior water scientist at Colorado State College and an professional 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 p.c fulland Mead is at about 34 p.c. If Powell’s water degree drops one other 40 or so ft, which it might this yrthere received’t be sufficient water to generate hydroelectric energy at Glen Canyon Dam. Water managers are beginning to fear about “useless pool” too, by which the lake will get too low to let water stream by way of Glen Canyon towards Lake Mead; they’re prone to scale back water stream out of Powell this yr to keep away from it.
In a lot of the Colorado River’s higher basin—in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming—water isn’t collected in lots of reservoirs; as a substitute, it’s diverted out to hundreds of small places, from streams to irrigation ditches. And “this yr, there simply isn’t going to be any water in these rivers. Or there can be water, however as a substitute of 12 weeks or 16 weeks of water, it is going to be 4 weeks of water,” Udall informed me. “Underneath western water legislation, folks can principally utterly dry these rivers up.”
That is unhealthy timing, as a result of Colorado and the opposite basin states are at present failing to renegotiate key components of the more-than-century-old Colorado River Compact, which expire later this yr. Together with seven states, the river-management settlement consists of 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 serious deadline on February 14which signifies that the Bureau of Reclamation will as a substitute impose its personal plan—one which not one of the states are prone to be proud of. In Colorado, at the very least, 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 received in 2024. That is removed from an irrational fear. In late December, Trump vetoed funding for a pipelinealready beneath development with bipartisan help, that may deliver water from a reservoir to rural communities in southeastern Colorado. The combat over the Colorado River might form up in comparable style, pitting state in opposition to state. (In response to a request for remark, a Division of the Inside spokesperson pointed me to a press launch by which 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 way of the western financial system. Agriculture, water recreation akin to fishing and river rafting, and whole 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 baggage 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 day by day.
