Colorado’s mountain snowpack delivered the worst water year in recorded history this spring, and the damage is now moving downstream. Federal forecasters said Thursday that Lake Powell — the upper Colorado River basin’s largest reservoir — is on track to receive the lowest summer inflow since the dam was built, threatening water allocations, hydropower, and the agricultural economy across the seven-state Colorado River basin.
Federal hydrologist Cody Moser of the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center said only 800,000 acre-feet of water is projected to flow into Lake Powell through July — 13 percent of the reservoir’s average supply and the lowest summer inflow in the reservoir’s history. The Bureau of Reclamation’s April projections placed the water-year minimum probable inflow at 2.78 million acre-feet, 29 percent of the historical average.
State climatologist Russ Schumacher of the Colorado Climate Center set the statewide snowpack water equivalent at just 22 percent of the historic median as of April 1 — lower than any year recorded under the current measurement system. As of the end of March, 103 of Colorado’s 117 snowpack monitoring sites reported values at or near the zero percentile, with 95 percent of sites at their lowest or second-lowest values on record.
Raquel Flinker, director of interstate and regional water resources at the Colorado River District, told a State of the River meeting in Grand Junction in April that 2026 has surpassed every previous dry year on record. “It’s far beyond 2002, which has been the year we normally think of as the worst year in hydrology,” Flinker said.
A late-March heat event accelerated snowmelt across elevations that typically stay frozen into early June. Some Western Slope streams reached their annual peak flow months ahead of schedule, and water managers are planning for an extremely dry summer. Dry soils absorbed meltwater before it could reach streams, reducing runoff efficiency on top of the volume shortfall.
Federal managers moved to protect what remains in the reservoir system. The Bureau of Reclamation announced it will reduce the annual release from Lake Powell to Lake Mead from 7.48 million acre-feet to 6.0 million acre-feet through September 2026 — the lowest release level in decades — and intends to release between 660,000 acre-feet and 1 million acre-feet from Flaming Gorge Reservoir between April 2026 and April 2027 to bolster Powell’s elevation. Without those actions, Reclamation projected Lake Powell declining below 3,490 feet — the minimum power pool level — by August, at which point water releases would be restricted to river outlet works only, disrupting regional power and water supplies.
Colorado’s representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission, appointed by Governor Polis, gave a cautious response to the lower-basin states’ latest conservation offer. Becky Mitchell said in a statement that a proposal from Arizona, California, and Nevada to conserve an additional one million acre-feet per year through 2028 was a “good first step” but “unsustainable,” and called for the parties to reconvene with a mediator.
The seven basin states have not agreed on a framework for operating the river after the current agreements expire at the end of 2026. The Bureau of Reclamation stated that if no consensus is reached, the Interior Department will set post-2026 operations unilaterally later this summer.
Colorado water law is engaging at the local level. Under prior appropriation, an irrigator with a senior water right who is not receiving a full supply can place a call, requiring state officials to curtail upstream junior water users. Division 6 Water Resources coordinator Brian Romig sent a March 28 notice to all Yampa basin water users reminding them of the process. The Yampa — among the last undeveloped rivers in the upper basin — had never seen a call until 2018.
Bill Long, president of the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District, said of the season: “This is a disaster. I don’t know that it could get much worse.” Farmers in his district expected irrigation water to flow for six to ten days this spring rather than the 45 to 60 days a typical year delivers.
The basin states face a hard deadline. Current operating agreements expire October 1, and the Interior Department has said it will act if they do not.
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