Hes also been a long-time guest host on Science Friday. Theyre roughly 25% full now, saidBrad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University. Applying data from three droughts from a 25-year period starting in 1988, it predicted that even with little new growth in that basin, a moderate drought would trigger shortages of 350,000 to 500,000 acre-feet. 40 fun events happening in Tucson this weekend Feb. 23-26 , Opinion: Help protect Lake Mead and Colorado River water, Colorado River runoff forecast keeps dropping, Warm weather reducing Colorado River runoff, study finds, Feds back off from Lake Mead water demand, Businesses, residents paid to save water in this Arizona valley, Tucson to leave nearly 20% of its CAP water in Lake Mead, 'Toilet to tap' water treatment will soon be legal in Arizona, officials say, Big snowstorms put Colorado River drought plan on ice, Colorado River tops group's 'endangered' list again, CAP-California water deal that Arizona nixed provokes ongoing conflict, Water bailout? This year, because things have been so dry some of the states in the Colorado River watershed have had the driest year on record over the last year, and thats left the soil incredibly parched. Its also headed toward a record low later this year. For context, on the scale of no drought to worst drought, theres no category that captures conditions more dry than exceptional. It's been a vital force for the intermountain West because of its ability to. That leaves a sizable deficit and little time to turn things around. But while Lake Mead . Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. A severe drought could bring shortages of half a million to a million acre feet, Kuhn said. In the year 2000, the two reservoirs were 95% full. LinkedIn sets this cookie to store performed actions on the website. The word unprecedented gets thrown around a lot in discussions about the Colorado River these days, and this is no exception. Explain that a little bit for us, Luke, and just how dire the situation is for the groundwater in the region. . Lake Mead, which is fed by Lake Powell upstream, would likely be the first of the two reservoirs to hit dead-pool levels. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads. Used by Yahoo to provide ads, content or analytics. Water levels dipped below 3,525 feet the last major milestone before a serious threat to hydropower generation at the Glen Canyon Dam. Lake Mead and Lake Powell, for water. In the short term, yes. The challenges are really hard, Fleck said. And really, what were seeing in the basin is that warming of just a couple degrees has the potential to completely upend how the water cycle functions in the Southwest. Join half a million readers enjoying Newsweek's free newsletters. As snowpack runoff disappeared into dry ground instead of hitting the reservoirs, engineers calculated a 79% chance Lake Powell will fall below its minimum target water height of 3,525 feet above sea level next year. Created by Bluecadet. works with the radio team to create our weekly show, and is helping to build our State of Science Reporting Network. Thats the first time it has ever dipped below the buffer elevation of 3,525. In an average year, Lake Powell gets enough water that it can release a bit more 8.23 million acre-feet a year. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage. All signs point to a hotter, drier future for the Western U.S. If the drought and excessive water use continues, Lake Mead could reach dead pool in the next two years and Lake Powell could soon follow. Earlier this year, the Bureau of Reclamation released about 500,000 acre-feet from Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Utah and Wyoming to Lake Powell, increasing its elevation about 16 feet. A . An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to fill one acre of land to a height of one foot. This cookie is associated with Django web development platform for python. And theres already a supply-demand imbalance on the Colorado River, and the supply is shrinking faster than officials are able to shrink the demands that we have on the river. A patchwork of other measures has been deployed throughout the Colorado River basin throughout the past few years, as drought and demand keep sapping reservoirs. Are experts looking at this saying, its just going to get worse in the Colorado River basin? Together, these reservoirs, fed by the mighty Colorado River, provide the water 40million Americans depend on. As Lake Mead outside Las Vegas and Lake Powell in Utah decline, certain policies are triggered into action. So the question is, how bad is it going to get? Overall, the river's flowis down 20% in this century relative to the 20th century. But there is still this fundamental supply-demand imbalance in the Colorado River basin. Credit: Alex Hager. The water level at Lake Mead is sitting at just 39%, while Lake Powell is at 36%. She compares the current drought conditions to 2018, another record-breaking hot and dry year just a couple years ago. But the warming temperatures that were seeing make it considerably worse than it would have been. Subscribe to stay connected to Tucson. The sp_t cookie is set by Spotify to implement audio content from Spotify on the website and also registers information on user interaction related to the audio content. This cookie is used to detect and defend when a client attempt to replay a cookie.This cookie manages the interaction with online bots and takes the appropriate actions. Welcome back to Science Friday, Luke. JOHN DANKOSKY: When you use the term megadrought, that sounds like a newer term. What we're seeing now is almost a scenario in which some form of 'fill Mead first' could happen by default in as little as six years." Between the drought years of 2000-2005, Lake Powell lost 13 . And it would increase the likelihood of cutbacks in river water deliveries to Arizona, in particular. The first warning sign would come if a drought pushed the lake below 3,525 feet, almost 85 feet below where it is now. JOHN DANKOSKY: This is Science Friday. Both Utah and Nevada experienced their driest years on record in 2020. "The federal government generally prefers to let the stakeholders work things through, Sorensen said. Glen Canyon Dam can release water below minimum power pool through bypass jets until an elevation of 3,370 feet, which is then the top of dead pool and no further water can be released. The nation's second-largest reservoir is under pressure from climate change and steady demand, and is now . Lake Powell is a few hundred feet above dead-pool level. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. And this is just the beginning of what could happen if the lake keeps drying up. This cookie, set by Cloudflare, is used to support Cloudflare Bot Management. And thats really what were watching right now, is how low is Lake Mead going to go? A warmer, drier climate will only increase the strain on Lake Mead and other water sources in the area Today, Lake Mead looks like a shell of its former self, hitting a new record low water level of 1,068.08 feet above sea level, according to a report from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. They've been ignoring the problem coming for decades and decades. As of August 10, water levels were measured to be 3,534.51 feet above sea level. Conditions have been deteriorating across the river basin since the summer of 2020. Lake Mead's water level on Wednesday was measured at 1,044.03 feet, its lowest elevation since the lake was filled in the 1930s. Down the Colorado River lies Lake Mead, which is also seeing lower water levels than ever before. LinkedIn sets this cookie from LinkedIn share buttons and ad tags to recognize browser ID. Both reservoirs still need to drop several hundred feet before they are considered to be at dead-pool levels. Those cutbacks are likely to grow steeper in 2021. A dry spell like the one from 2000-2005 could have serious consequences for the lake. Such is the nature of the climate change beast that we have unleashed.. In an emergency request issued in June 2022, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation urged states relying on the Colorado River basin to reduce their water usage by between 2 million and 4 million acre-feet over the next 18 months. Its 90% of the water supply to Las Vegas, 50% to Phoenix, effectively 100% to Tucson and 25% to Los Angeles, said Udall. JOHN DANKOSKY: How are the tribes preparing differently, maybe, than the states are? JOHN DANKOSKY: Luke Runyon is a reporter based at KUNC in Fort Collins, Colorado. Lake Mead's decline is not happening in isolation, but is the result of a two-decade drought hitting the western U.S. and causing critical water shortages on the Colorado River. As an imbalance between water supplies and demands grows in the region, KUNC is committed to covering the stories that emerge. In addition, Mankin said, interventions like the Flaming Gorge release treat the western U.S.s 20-year drought as a localized phenomenon rather than a regional one. LinkedIn sets this cookie for LinkedIn Ads ID syncing. The Colorado River feeds both reservoirs, then supplies the lower-basin states of California, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico with water. The increase in temperatures means the atmosphere is thirstier. The Bureau's projections show a 3% chance that Lake Powell's water levels fall below the minimum level necessary for the lake's Glen Canyon Dam to generate hydroelectricity next year. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Luke Runyon is the water reporter at KUNC in Greeley, Colorado. Record-breaking high temperatures dragged well into fall. Balken surmises the jugs were tied to the trees back when Lake Powell just covered their upper branches to warn boaters of the hazard beneath the surface. This cookie is installed by Google Universal Analytics to restrain request rate and thus limit the collection of data on high traffic sites. At this stage a significant amount of Glen Canyon . Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies do not allow the tracking of navigation on other websites and the data collected is not combined or shared with third parties. Azure sets this cookie for routing production traffic by specifying the production slot. And youre able to say, oh, the rivers high, or the river is low. Issued by Microsoft's ASP.NET Application, this cookie stores session data during a user's website visit. The reservoir is integrating all the problems we have, all the challenges we face show up in that one number, in that one place, he said. More than four scientific studieshave pinned a large part of the decline on human climate change. According to the National Park Service, contaminants from the newly exposed shorelines are reentering warm, shallow areas and becoming more concentrated. They werent able to come up with an agreement. This Statista chart shows the share of the continental United States' area under different levels of drought between 2018 and 2022. Lake Powell hasn't been this low since June of 1965, just two years after it began to fill with water. Future conservation efforts are highly uncertain. Lake Powell has been called Jewel of the Colorado by the federal agency that built it, the Bureau of Reclamation. It wascreated by blocking the Colorado River atGlen Canyon in southern Utah and northernArizona. "I've been here since 2007 and obviously this is way lower than I've ever seen it.". It stores water as part of the Colorado River Compact and produceselectricity through the hydroelectric turbines in Glen Canyon dam. The Upper Colorado Commissions computer models have shown that if the Upper Basin states take the precautionary measures theyre talking about, the risk of Powell falling to dangerously low levels is near zero even if the basin gets another 25 years of weather like it did from 1988 through 2012, said Don Ostler, executive director the Upper Colorado River Commission. which could funnel up to 300,000 acre-feet from Powell.One of those projects, Utah's Lake Powell pipeline to St. George, would . What are the effects of climate change? "Arizona is, to a greater or lesser degree, selling water to California," CAP attorney said of the later-killed deal. Newsweek previously. Lake Oroville, a key component of California's water supply, also benefited from the early-winter storms, as . Give us an idea, if you would, just how low the supply is in the basins reservoirs right now. Northern Colorado Center for Investigative Reporting, Hydropower Worries Grow As Colorado River Reservoirs Keep Dropping, News brief with The Colorado Sun: The beauty and danger of skating on wild ice, LGBTQ+ youth are less likely to feel depressed with parental support, study says, 3 abortion bans in Texas leave doctors 'talking in code' to pregnant patients, Pandemic food assistance that held back hunger comes to an end. California broke from six other Western states in proposal to cut Colorado River use as water levels reach historic lows. Tony graduated from Northwestern University and started at the Star in 1997. House Democrat nods to Kellyanne Conway in push to make Hatch Act violations a Hemorrhaging losses, the Feds problems are now the taxpayers, Lukashenko arrives in Beijing as concerns rise around China-Russia relations. The use of these cookies is strictly limited to measuring the site's audience. Weve seen evaporation increase from reservoirs and streams at higher temperatures. Newsweek previously reported that Lake Mead's dead pool level is 895 feet, while Lake Powell's is 3,370. The state already is on the edge of shortages for its $4 billion Central Arizona Project. However, he said the biggest impact will be the water. Joining me to shed a little bit more light on this is Luke Runyon. The cookie is a session cookies and is deleted when all the browser windows are closed. You cant go into a drought like that today if its half full. Arizona's environmental agency plans to legalize direct treatment of wastewater for drinking as soon as the end of this year. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". As a key ingredient in everything from asphalt to microchips, scientists are trying to make sand extraction more ecologically friendly. The regions been looking warily at the reservoirs along this long river that winds its way from Colorados Rocky Mountains all the way to Mexico, just shy of the Gulf of California. JOHN DANKOSKY: Local science stories of national significance. Despite the storms that brought heavy rain and snow to California and other Western states in January, experts say it would take years of such weather to replenish the West's water resources. Theyre already low, because the entire watershed has been experiencing above-average temperatures and below-average river flows since the year 2000. Glen Canyon Dam, Colorado River, Arizona. June of 1965, just how low the supply is in the region, KUNC is committed to covering stories. 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