A dry January across Colorado and the rest of the Rocky Mountain West has created a dichotomy of water haves and have-nots across the region.
Snowpack across Colorado ranges from close to normal levels near the Colorado River headwaters, outside Grand Lake, to troublingly low along the state’s southern border.
The pattern of snow conditions worsening from north to south is also visible across the broader mountain west — where snowpack is near normal in the most fortunate places and drastically below normal in the southern tail of the Rocky Mountains.
“It’s not a pretty picture, January’s precipitation,” said Cody Moser, a senior hydrologist at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center.
The drought across much of the mountain west follows a year when many states recorded some of their warmest average temperatures in the last 130 years. 2024 was Colorado’s fourth-warmest year in that time period, and it was the second-warmest year for New Mexico and Utah and the third-warmest year for Arizona and Wyoming.
The variation in snowpack means water supplies could vary greatly across the state and region once runoff begins in the spring.
“We currently have been degrading across the mountain west in terms of drought,” said Gretel Follingstad, the regional drought information coordinator for the Intermountain West region of the National Integrated Drought Information System.
Variability in snowpack
Statewide, the snowpack is at 82% of the median between 1991 and 2020.
Snowpack in the mountains from near Rocky Mountain National Park to the ranges in the south near Aspen, Silverthorne and Buena Vista are generally sitting at near-to-above normal.
Mountains farther south and west, however, remain much more dry. A snow observation station near Mancos is recording snowpack at 31% of normal — the lowest in the state.
In southwest Colorado, snowpack in the San Miguel, Dolores, Animas and San Juan basins is at only 61% of median. The Upper Rio Grande Basin, similarly, sits at 64% of median.
Several weather stations in the Dolores and San Juan river basins recorded record-low levels of precipitation in December and January, Moser said.
Lower-than-normal runoff
In the Colorado River basin, a similar north-south pattern is playing out. Water-supply forecasts in the Upper Colorado River Basin — above Lake Powell — are more promising than in the Lower Basin.
A dry January across the basin erased the gains from early December snows, Moser said.
Snowpack in the Upper Basin is at 86% of the median of the last 30 years, while snowpack measurements in the Lower Basin are all less than 10% of the median. The snowpack and soil moisture conditions mean that water supply forecasts for the basin are below normal.
Water supply estimates range between 86% and 92% of normal on the upper stretches of the mainstem of the Colorado River — from its headwaters near Grand Lake through Grand Junction. Across the entire river basin, only one area is forecast to deliver water supply above the median — near Winter Park.
In the Lower Basin, however, water supply is forecast to be between 7% and 38% of normal. Some areas in the Lower Basin have experienced their driest winters to date on record, like Flagstaff, Arizona.
“There are extremely dry conditions across the Lower Colorado River Basin this winter,” Moser said.
Forecasters now expect runoff into Lake Powell to be 67% of normal — down from the 81% they predicted in January.
That’s bad news for those in the Lower Basin who depend on releases from Lake Powell and Lake Mead for their water. Both reservoirs — the largest in the nation — sit at about a third full.
The lower-than-normal runoff into Lake Powell comes as representatives from the seven states that rely on the Colorado River continue to negotiate how the river should be apportioned in the coming decades. The negotiators are working out how to divide cuts to water supplies as the river’s flows shrink and precipitation becomes less reliable.
Expanding drought
Warmer temperatures and a recent lack of snow have plunged more of the mountain west into drought, Tony Bergantino, director of the Wyoming State Climate Office and Water Resources Data Center, said last week during a presentation for the National Integrated Drought Information System.
All five of the states in the system’s Intermountain West region — Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — are experiencing some level of drought, he said.
Colorado is faring the best among the five states with only 17% of its land in drought conditions. Its northern mountains also were buoyed by weekend storms.
The states in the region with the worst droughts — Arizona and Wyoming — both have 83% of their land in drought conditions. More than a fifth of the land in each state is in extreme drought — the second-highest tier of drought classification by the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Only a sliver of Colorado, in Weld and Larimer counties, are impacted by extreme drought.
The La Niña weather pattern that often fuels dry conditions across portions of the southwest are expected to last through April, Moser said.
But the next few weeks could bring wetter weather across the southwest than has been seen in the last month, he said.
“Six, seven days from now, weather models are showing wetter weather than we’ve seen,” he said on Friday.
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