https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/
The Southwest’s most important river is drying up
The Colorado River irrigates farms, powers electric grids, and provides drinking water to 40 million people. But as its supply dwindles, a crisis looms.
Maricopa, Arizona
For farmers in the deserts of central Arizona, success and failure is defined by who has water and who does not. At the moment, Dan Thelander is still among the haves.
Las Vegas relies on the [Colorado] river for 90% of its water supply, Tucson for 82% and San Diego for around 66%. Large portions of the water used in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Denver also come from the river, and experts say these booming metropolises would not have been possible without its supply.
CNN
Inside a municipal building in Pinal County, Thelander rolls a map out across the board room table.
On the patchwork of brown desert and green farmland in front of us, Thelander points out the parcels of land where he and his brother, son and nephew grow cotton, alfalfa and several other crops.
About half the water he uses to irrigate his land is pumped out of ancient aquifers deep beneath the desert floor. The other half, however, originates hundreds of miles away at the headwaters of the Colorado River.
The water begins its journey high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, where it first falls as snow.
As winter fades and the snowpack melts, water drains into the mountain streams and tributaries that feed the Colorado River.
The river’s vast drainage area is divided into two regions: the Upper and Lower Basin. Around 90% of the river’s flow originates in the Upper Basin.
After flowing down from the Upper Basin, the river snakes its way across the Southwest, eventually reaching Lake Mead near Las Vegas. From there, a system of dams, canals and pipelines channel it into the irrigation ditches that water Thelander’s thirsty fields in Pinal County.
Today, this river system supplies 40 million people in seven western states and Mexico, and irrigates more than 5 million acres of farmland on its way into Mexico and the Gulf of California.
Las Vegas relies on the river for 90% of its water supply, Tucson for 82% and San Diego for around 66%. Large portions of the water used in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Denver also come from the river, and experts say these booming metropolises would not have been possible without its supply.
But a crisis is unfolding, and farmers, scientists, water managers and policy makers across the Southwest are increasingly alarmed.
Water managers have long recognized that the river is plagued by overuse. But over the last two decades, demand for the river’s water has often outstripped its supply. Since 2000, the river’s flows have shrunk by roughly 20% compared to the 20th century average, due in large part to the human-caused climate crisis. At the same time, its two main reservoirs — the savings account for the entire system in times of drought — have drained rapidly.
Lake Mead — the largest manmade reservoir in the US, which is fed by the Colorado River — recently sunk to its lowest levels since the lake was filled in the 1930s. Its water levels have fallen more than 146 feet since their peak in January of 2000, and the lake is now just 35% full. Lake Powell, the river’s second largest reservoir, sits at 32% of its capacity. As water levels drop, billions of kilowatt hours of hydroelectricity that power homes from Nebraska to Arizona are also at risk.
We’re in uncharted territory for this system,” says Jeff Lukas, an independent consultant and former research scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he focused on water issues for 20 years.
On Monday, the US Bureau of Reclamation declared the first-ever official shortage, which will trigger the largest mandatory water cuts to date in the Colorado River Basin. And after decades of receiving water from the Colorado River, the spigot could soon be turned off on many farms here, including Thelander’s.
A study published in the journal Science in 2020 found that the period from 2000 to 2018 was the driest stretch the Southwest has experienced since the 1500s, and that nearly half of the drought’s severity could be attributed to global warming.
CNN
While the farmers knew this day would come, a harsh reality is setting in: To stay in business, they’ll need to pull more water from below ground.
Back on the table, Thelander points to the diamonds and circles that dot the map. Those mark the locations of new groundwater wells that his irrigation district is considering — the first new ones they have drilled in decades, Thelander says.
For much of the last century, Colorado River management has focused on choosing who will be allowed to stick their straw into the river next and how much water they can take. At times, that process has sparked major disputes — with some leading all the way to the US Supreme Court.
Now, many of the basin states are having a more painful discussion: deciding who will receive less water — and how much. Experts say the next phase in the river’s history could be even more contentious.
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California snowpack is critically low, signaling another year of devastating drought
Twin Bridges, California
Snowpack in the California Sierra this winter is just 38% of normal, California water officials said Friday, in the latest sign the state’s drought is growing more devastating by the month.
South of Lake Tahoe at Phillips Station, where officials set out Friday to conduct the annual end-of-winter snowpack measurement, the snow depth was just 2.5 inches. The average April 1 snow depth is 66.5 inches at this location, officials said.
More importantly, that 2.5 inches of snow only contained the equivalent of 1 inch of water — a scant 4% of average for April 1, according to Sean de Guzman, an engineer with the California Department of Water Resources.
Snow typically builds up in the Sierra Nevada throughout the winter, storing precious water that later melts and drains into reservoirs in the spring. California snowpack provides 30% of the state’s water, according to the Department of Water Resources.
Earlier on Friday, the National Weather Service reported an alarming statistic: the January-March period this year was the driest such period “by a huge margin” in 101 years of record-keeping at three key observing stations in California.
“During that period, California’s only received about half the amount of rainfall recorded in comparison to 2013, which ended up turning into the driest calendar year on record,” de Guzman said.
It’s a huge nosedive from how this winter started on the West Coast.
Climatologists were elated in December as they watched the snow pile up that month. More than 17 feet of snow fell near Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada, breaking decades-old records.
Then, starting in January, precipitation “flatlined.” Statewide snowpack, which — at 6.5 feet — was above average in December, sank to 90% of normal. Just 9 inches of snow fell at Donner Pass in January.
State officials are preparing for water shortages this summer. California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order Monday calling on local water agencies to implement their conservation plans and urging residents to self-monitor water use. He directed the State Water Resources Board to consider a ban on watering decorative grass at businesses and institutions, according to a release from his office, but would not include residential lawns or green areas in schools and parks.
“While we have made historic investments to protect our communities, economy and ecosystems from the worsening drought across the West, it is clear we need to do more,” Newsom said.
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Lake Mead water levels fall to 35% full over 21 years
2000
2021
Composite imagery from NASA/USGS
“We’re in uncharted territory for this system,” says Jeff Lukas, an independent consultant and former research scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he focused on water issues for 20 years.
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Lake Mead plummets to unprecedented low, exposing original 1971 water intake valve
By Stephanie Elam, CNN
Updated 2307 GMT (0707 HKT) April 29, 2022
Southern Nevada Water Authority’s original water intake valve in Lake Mead — in service since 1971 — is now visible above the water line.
The West is in the grips of a climate change-fueled megadrought, and Lake Mead — the largest manmade reservoir in the country and a source of water for millions of people — has fallen to an unprecedented low.
The lake’s plummeting water level has exposed one of the reservoir’s original water intake valves for the first time, officials say.
The valve had been in service since 1971 but can no longer draw water, according to the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which is responsible for managing water resources for 2.2 million people in Southern Nevada, including Las Vegas.
Across the West, extreme drought is already taking a toll this year and summertime heat hasn’t even arrived yet. Drought conditions worsened in the Southwest over the past week, the US Drought Monitor reported Thursday. Extreme and exceptional drought, the two worst designations, expanded across New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado — all states that are part of the Colorado River basin.
New Mexico’s drought has been steadily intensifying since the beginning of the year, and extreme or exceptional drought now covers 68% of the state.
Further West, water officials in Southern California are now demanding that residents and businesses limit outdoor watering to one day a week, after a disappointing winter with very little rain and snow. It’s the first time they’ve implemented such a strict rule.
“This is a crisis. This is unprecedented,” said Adel Hagekhalil, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. “We have never done anything like this before and because we haven’t seen this situation happen like this before. We don’t have enough water to meet normal demands for the six million people living in the State Water Project dependent areas.”
https://ix.cnn.io/dailygraphics/graphics/20210607-drought-tracker/index.html?initialWidth=780&childId=responsive-embed-20210607-drought-tracker&parentTitle=Lake%20Mead%20water%20valve%20is%20exposed%20for%20the%20first%20time%20amid%20historic%20drought%20-%20CNN&parentUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fedition.cnn.com%2F2022%2F04%2F27%2Fus%2Fwater-intake-exposed-lake-mead-drought-climate%2Findex.html
At Lake Mead, photos taken Monday show the eldest of the agency’s three intake valves high and dry above the water line.
“When the lake hit 1060 (feet above sea level), that’s when you could start to see the top of the intake number one,” said Bronson Mack, public outreach officer for the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
Lake Mead hit 1,060 feet above sea level on April 4 and stands at 1055 feet as of Wednesday, he said.
As a result, the water authority has begun operating new, low-lake pumping station for the first time — a valve situated deeper at the bottom of Lake Mead. The station, which began construction in 2015 and was completed in 2020, is capable of delivering water with the lake at a much lower level, and was built to protect the region’s water resource in light of worsening drought.
“There was no impact to operation’s ability to deliver water,” Mack said. “Customers didn’t notice anything. It was a seamless transition.”
Water flowing down the Colorado River fills Lake Mead and Lake Powell — another critical reservoir in the West — and the river system supports more than 40 million people living across seven Western states and Mexico. Both reservoirs provide drinking water and irrigation for many communities across the region, including rural farms, ranches and native communities.
The original intake is no longer in use since it cannot draw water.
The federal government declared a water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time last summer. The shortage triggered mandatory water consumption cuts for states in the Southwest, which began in January.
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As California’s big cities fail to rein in their water use, rural communities are already tapped out
(CNN)Gary Biggs’ family hasn’t had water coming out of their private well for over a decade, after a multi-year drought and overpumping by agriculture and industry.
Now, the eight-acre farm in West Goshen, California, which Biggs passed down to his son, Ryan, in the 1970s, is parched and fallow. His son and granddaughter carry in water from sources to drink and shower. They go to town to wash their clothes, Biggs says.
In recent years, the family has gone from relying on water from cisterns provided by government programs, which they say tastes terrible, to hauling water containers to and from neighbors’ homes — neighbors who are willing to share what they have left
Biggs, 72, still remembers when the family property had a thriving orchard. When he was a teenager, he planted pecan and orange trees, while his father grew alfalfa and raised cows and sheep.
“Now, it’s all dirt,” Biggs, a lifelong California resident, told CNN. “Central California is dying. We’re becoming a wasteland. A hot and dry wasteland.”
“And God forbid, I don’t know how long this drought is gonna go on,” he added. “Believe it or not climate change is here, and California is a poster child for it.”
As cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco struggle to cut their water use — water that overwhelmingly comes from the state’s reservoirs — rural Californians that rely on groundwater are already tapped out. They live with the daily worry that they won’t have enough water to bathe with or drink.
Gary Biggs says his family’s well in West Goshen went dry many years ago.
Ruth Martínez is a clean water advocate in who lives in the small town of Ducor.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has pleaded with urban residents and businesses to reduce their water consumption by 15%, but water usage in March was up by 19% in cities compared to March 2020, the year the current drought began. With the state running out of water, unprecedented water cuts went into effect this week for city dwellers — in parts of southern California, residents have been asked to cut consumption by 35% to avoid a full ban on watering later in the summer.
Scorching summer heat is also approaching. Water evaporates from the soil on hot days, which worsens the drought — a key reason never-before-seen groundwater shortages are cropping up. Not only has there not been enough rain to fill reservoirs, the air is leeching water from what’s left on the ground.
Then there’s contamination from industry.
Ruth Martínez, who lives in the small, unincorporated town of Ducor in Tulare County, has been advocating for clean water for decades. In the town of roughly 600 people, mostly Latino residents, their drinking water had been contaminated with nitrate, which is typically caused by the fertilizer used in agriculture.
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Why the Great American Lawn is terrible for the West’s water crisis
An aerial view of homes in San Diego. Grass lawns require exorbitant amounts of water to maintain — water that is rapidly running out in the West.
(CNN)As California plunges even deeper into its multiyear megadrought after an alarmingly dry winter, officials are eyeing what experts say is one of the leading culprits in the crisis: water-guzzling grass lawns.
Residents and businesses in the counties around Los Angeles were told this week that they would need to limit outdoor water use to one day a week starting June 1. It’s the first time water officials have implemented such a strict rule.
“This is a crisis. This is unprecedented,” said Adel Hagekhalil, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. “We have never done anything like this before and because we haven’t seen this situation happen like this before.”
The Great American Lawn has historically been a status symbol and portrayed as a place of leisure and comfort. But they require exorbitant amounts of water to maintain — water that is rapidly running out.
Grass was the single largest irrigated “crop” in America, surpassing corn and wheat, a frequently cited study from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found. It noted that by the early 2000s, turf grass — mostly in front lawns — spanned about 63,000 square miles, an area larger than the state of Georgia.
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Incredible before and after photos show just how much this critical reservoir has dried up
Lone Rock Beach at Lake Powell in Big Water, Utah. JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
The second-largest man-made reservoir in the country has dropped to unthinkable lows amid the West’s climate change-driven megadrought.
A pair of before and after photos at Lake Powell illustrates how alarming the transformation has been. The “before” was taken June 23, 2021, and the “after” was taken Sunday. In the first image, countless waves ripple across the landscape and the lake surrounds the massive Lone Rock; in the second — from the same vantage point — the ground sits parched, nary a puddle to be seen.
At around 24% full, Lake Powell is at its lowest level since 1963, when the Glen Canyon Dam was built and the reservoir — near the Utah-Arizona border — was filled.
Water flowing down the Colorado River fills Lake Powell and Lake Mead — another critical reservoir in the West — and the river system supports more than 40 million people living across seven Western states and Mexico.
Both reservoirs provide a critical supply of drinking water and irrigation for many communities across the region, including rural farms, ranches and native communities.
This month, Lake Powell’s water level dropped below a key threshold under which the water shortage situation becomes dire. Much below this level, the Glen Canyon Dam risks no longer being able to generate hydropower at the Glen Canyon Powerplant.
There’s a 1 in 3 chance Lake Powell’s level will be too low in 2023 for the plant to generate electricity, according to a US Bureau of Reclamation report released in September. At full capacity, the dam produces power for around 5.8 million homes and businesses from Nebraska to Nevada.
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The two largest reservoirs in California are already at ‘critically low levels’ and the dry season is just starting
Against the backdrop of the water crisis in the Colorado River Basin, where the country’s largest reservoirs are plunging at an alarming rate, California’s two largest reservoirs — Shasta Lake and Lake Oroville — are facing a similar struggle.
Years of low rainfall and snowpack and more intense heat waves have fed directly to the state’s multiyear, unrelenting drought conditions, rapidly draining statewide reservoirs. And according to this week’s report from the US Drought Monitor, the two major reservoirs are at “critically low levels” at the point of the year when they should be the highest.
This week, Shasta Lake is only at 40% of its total capacity, the lowest it has ever been at the start of May since record-keeping began in 1977. Meanwhile, further south, Lake Oroville is at 55% of its capacity, which is 70% of where it should be around this time on average.
Shasta Lake is the largest reservoir in the state and the cornerstone of California’s Central Valley Project, a complex water system made of 19 dams and reservoirs as well as more than 500 miles of canals, stretching from Redding to the north, all the way south to the drought-stricken landscapes of Bakersfield.
Shasta Lake’s water levels are now less than half of historical average. According to the US Bureau of Reclamation, only agriculture customers who are senior water right holders and some irrigation districts in the Eastern San Joaquin Valley will receive the Central Valley Project water deliveries this year.
“We anticipate that in the Sacramento Valley alone, over 350,000 acres of farmland will be fallowed,” Mary Lee Knecht, public affairs officer for the Bureau’s California-Great Basin Region, told CNN. For perspective, it’s an area larger than Los Angeles. “Cities and towns that receive [Central Valley Project] water supply, including Silicon Valley communities, have been reduced to health and safety needs only.”
A lot is at stake with the plummeting supply, said Jessica Gable with Food & Water Watch, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on food and water security as well as climate change. The impending summer heat and the water shortages, she said, will hit California’s most vulnerable populations, particularly those in farming communities, the hardest.
“Communities across California are going to suffer this year during the drought, and it’s just a question of how much more they suffer,” Gable told CNN. “It’s usually the most vulnerable communities who are going to suffer the worst, so usually the Central Valley comes to mind because this is an already arid part of the state with most of the state’s agriculture and most of the state’s energy development, which are both water-intensive industries.”
‘Only 5%’ of water to be supplied’
Lake Oroville is the largest reservoir in California’s State Water Project system, which is separate from the Central Valley Project, operated by the California Department of Water Resources (DWR). It provides water to 27 million Californians and 750,000 acres of farmland.
Last year, Oroville took a major hit after water levels plunged to just 24% of total capacity, forcing a crucial California hydroelectric power plant to shut down for the first time since it opened in 1967. The lake’s water level sat well below boat ramps, and exposed intake pipes which usually sent water to power the dam.
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Severe drought and mandatory water cuts are pitting communities against each other in Arizona
The Hayden-Rhodes Aqueduct, fed by the Colorado River, runs through Scottsdale, Arizona.
Scottsdale, Arizona
As the climate crisis intensifies, battle lines are beginning to form over water. In Arizona — amid a decades-long megadrought — some communities are facing the very real possibility of losing access to the precious water that remains.
Outside the city limits of Scottsdale, where the asphalt ends and the dirt road begins, is the Rio Verde Foothills community. Hundreds of homes here get water trucked in from Scottsdale, but those deliveries will end on January 1, 2023.
That’s because last summer, for the first time ever, drought conditions forced the federal government to declare a tier 1 water shortage in the Colorado River, reducing how much Arizona can use.
Meredith Deangelis lives in the community, and the thought of losing access to water keeps her up at night.
“Every time I brush my teeth, I think, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t imagine that I’m not going to have water to brush my teeth,'” Deangelis told CNN.
Scottsdale’s water department told CNN in an email that “Scottsdale has continued to be a good neighbor in allowing Rio Verde to temporarily use its water supply.” The department said that due to the current water shortage, by law it “must dedicate its limited water supply to its residents.”
Deangelis and her neighbors are hoping to find another water source to purchase for their homes, but in order to do that they must get certain approvals from their county, which has not happened yet.
“To think, I have this beautiful home and I’m not going to be able to live here because water is not going to be approved and provided to my home is just incredibly unnerving and stressful,” Deangelis said.
A dry irrigation canal that runs through land farmed by Tempe Farming Company, in Casa Grande, Arizona. The Colorado River has been a go-to source of water for cities, tribes and farmers in the West for decades. A water shortage was declared for the first time on the river last year.
On the western border of Arizona, acres of farmland are luring big-city investment firms to rural Cibola. The land there comes with water rights to the Colorado River, a prized possession in a drought-ravaged state.
Greenstone, a Phoenix-based investment firm, bought nearly 500 acres with the intent to sell the land’s water allotment to Queen Creek, a growing Phoenix suburb about 200 miles away.
Holly Irwin, a district supervisor in La Paz County, home to Cibola, is fighting the plan.
“We are what I call the ‘sacrificial lamb’ for the bigger areas,” Irwin told CNN. “In my opinion, look somewhere else — we need to be able to sustain ourselves.”
The scarcity of water in the state is pitting small towns against fast-growing metropolitan communities.
Queen Creek’s utility director, Paul Gardner, says the community has a 100-year supply of groundwater, but he’s planning for the decades beyond that to make sure the community will always have a sustainable water source.
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