This year’s dry January hurt forecasts for the Colorado River, but February may position the basin for a comeback.
The Colorado River relies heavily on snowpack in the Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — that melts into the river and its tributaries. That water then flows into Lake Powell.
But lackluster January precipitation led snowpack to decline in those states. Last month, snow levels above Lake Powell were 94% of average. (“Average,” in forecasting, refers to the average precipitation between 1991 and 2020.)
As of Feb. 6, snowpack fell to 83% of normal above Lake Powell.
“It was a very poor month precipitation-wise,” Cody Moser, senior hydrologist at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, said at a water supply briefing Friday.
Late January and early February also saw an influx of warmer temperatures in the Rocky Mountains, including Utah, which didn’t help snowpack levels — despite increased precipitation.
The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center reported that a National Weather Service employee "observed rainfall in the Wasatch at elevations as high as 10,000 feet.”
[Read more: Utah ski areas have seen record heat, low snowpack, but there’s hope for them yet]
The decline in snowpack has led forecasters to adjust their predictions for the amount of water that will flow into Lake Powell this spring and summer.
At the start of January, hydrologists predicted that spring runoff into Lake Powell between April and July would be 81% of average. Forecasters now expect runoff into the second largest reservoir in the U.S. to be just 67% of normal.
Water-wise, 67% of normal runoff into Lake Powell between April and July is 4.3 million acre-feet; the median runoff over the last thirty years has been 6.13 million acre-feet. An acre-foot is enough water to sustain two Utah households for a year, according to the Utah Division of Water Rights.
The Upper Basin’s snow season is 65% complete as of Feb. 1. But the next month could bring relief, forecasters said.
“Confidence is growing in the return of a productive southerly storm track around the middle of the month,” Moser said Friday. “Six, seven days from now, weather models are showing wetter weather than we’ve seen.”
Lake Powell water levels have rebounded more than 40 feet since hitting a record low in 2023. The reservoir currently sits at roughly 34% full, or 3,566 feet above sea level.
