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I'm a Colorado River nerd and my new favorite place on the Internet is a blog called Coyote Gulch which is all about Colorado's streams and rivers and just its water supply in general. Coyote Gulch gets updated with the latest Colorado water news everyday including (sometimes) the weekends.
My fellow Coloradans, I am sorry to report that things do not look good either water wise or climate wise (really two sides of the same coin).
Coyote Gulch quotes the following from the Washington Post (dated April 16, 2021):
Quote:
The snowpack season is ending in the Colorado River Basin as the spring melt is underway. If we take stock of the water supply over this vast basin, a critical resource for millions of people in the West, the news is not good.
The snowpack season, so important for the storage of water that can be tapped during the dry summer months, fell well short of expectations. The consequences of the shortfall for the basin, encompassing Arizona and parts of six other states, from Wyoming to California, are major.
1. There is an increased risk for large wildfires that can devastate state and national forests, reduce summer recreation activities, compromise air quality for large areas of the country and put populations near the urban-forest intersections in danger.
2. The reduced water supply affects municipal and agricultural water users not only within the basin’s 246,000 square miles, but also outside it, including Denver, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles.
3. Prolonged drought could ultimately affect food supply, causing reductions in crop yields and livestock herds.
I personally can attest to the truth of point 3 above. I live on a large ranch outside of Cortez, and the ranch foreman has been growing more melancholy by the day. Last week he told me that thanks to the fact that our local reservoir - McPhee - is only at 44% of normal, the irrigation season for farms and ranches out here will be cut in half. This means no more irrigation water beginning in August and that means only two cuttings of hay compared to a normal four cuttings.
We hope the monsoon will come along and at least give us enough rainfall for a third cutting, but no one is very optimistic given that last summer's monsoon lasted for a mere 3 days - literally - before evaporating off into the desert skies and vanishing at least a month before it normally would. There are very likely going to be some very hungry cattle around here, so invest in burgers and steaks for your freezer now before the price of a pound of burger reaches new highs.
Now you may be wondering about point 2 which states that Denver will be among the urban centers impacted by the coming water shortages. After all, Denver has had some pretty good snowstorms lately and Colorado Springs Utilities, Aurora Water and Pueblo Board of Water Works have a sizeable amount of acre-feet of water stored in a reservoir near Homestake Creek, a tributary of the Eagle River. And more reservoirs diverting water from the Western Slope to the Front Range are in the planning process. Go, Kentucky bluegrass!
Except...
There's The latest Bureau of Reclamation reservoir projections, which show a likelihood that Lake Mead on the Arizona-Nevada state line will dip below the critical threshold of 1,075 feet in elevation in May and remain below that level for the foreseeable future.
If Mead drops below 1,075 feet, this means that a first-ever official shortage declaration from the Department of the Interior is almost certain later this year. According to the terms of a 2007 agreement, a shortage is declared by the Interior Secretary after consulting with water users in the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada. Of course we don't want our friends in LA and Phoenix to go thirsty, but at the end of the day Colorado does have a sort of monopoly on Western water resources since the Colorado River on which we all depend is OUR river, originating in OUR mountains, right? Wrong.
If the Department of the Interior declares an official water shortage, this sets the stage for what is known as a "compact call." This scenario, the chances of which increase as climate change continues to reduce river flows, could occur if the upper-basin states (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico) can’t deliver the 7.5 million acre-feet of water per year to the lower-basin states (Arizona, California and Nevada), as required by a nearly century-old binding agreement.
A compact call could be especially problematic for Front Range water providers since most of their rights that let them divert water over the Continental Divide from the Western Slope date to after the 1922 Colorado River Compact. That means mandatory cutbacks in water use could fall more heavily on the post-compact water rights of Front Range water providers since the upper basin states are required to give that 7.5 million acre feet of water to the lower basin BEFORE we withdraw any water for our own needs.
Coloradans would thirstily watch the Colorado River flow out of our state before being allowed so much as a teaspoon of its water for our own needs until California and the rest got their 7.5 million first. This is why that in Western states they say, "Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting."
Which brings us to point 1. So are we ready for another rip roaring fire season, boys and girls? Will parts of Colorado Springs burn down for yet a third time this summer? Will tourists in Rocky Mountain National Park be forced to flee walls of flame? Will residents of Grand Junction be hospitalized in record numbers thanks to smoke inhalation from the many fires on the Western Slope? Personally, I live in dread of the day that the tinder dry forests of the San Juan Mountains erupt into a firestorm and become the latest backdrop for the national evening news. And you thought the fires in California were bad...
Now, I realize that some may think that I'm being overly dramatic about all these things. Maybe I should change my user name to "Donna Doom" and start writing dystopian Sci Fi novels. Unfortunately, Coyote Gulch and I are simply passing on the latest information from the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Colorado River Water Conservation District among many other respected sources with a dash of Western water law thrown in on the side.
I honestly hope that all these sources are completely wrong in their predictions. Alas, I'm pretty certain that they are correct.
Our entire neighborhood is xeriscaped, but you drive just down the road and lawns are in front of every home.
My dog loves to pee in the gravel just as much as he used to on grass. Just ask him.
CR, thanks for posting the link to that blog! I’ll add it to my bookmarks.
It’s going to be a severely reduced water year for all of us here, whether for aggie or rec use. I’ve never seen reservoir and river levels this low in CO in early spring.
It is high time to emphasize little ways that household users (which is ALL people) can conserve water. Little amounts add up when multiplied by many times and many people.
1. For example, at some restaurants the servers will automatically top up water glasses whether or not you need more. Sometimes they ask before doing so, but sometimes they whisk over and pour even though you finished eating and have received the check. We can put up a hand and say, “No Thanks; I Am All Set” to avoid this top-up, which will get wasted otherwise.
2. Another one which a former neighbor told me she and husband did during an unusually dry summer in a normally not-droughty region: Put a bucket down to collect the cold but clean water that comes out of the shower or tub spigot while you wait for the water to warm up. It is drinking-quality water, sometimes gallons of it going down the drain! She saved it to water the garden with. It could also be poured into jugs or bottles to save as (*gasp*) drinking water for later use, or to rinse dishes off before washing them in detergent.
Confession: I have not yet collected preshower cold water (though I do save cold sink water and put it in hiker bottles for later) but I will so do this year. It is merely a matter of putting a clean bucket in the shower or tub and, after the shower, funneling it into jugs. Minor inconvenience—but it seems that many US people balk tremendously at small inconveniences...
3. When I grew up, nobody thought twice about letting tap water keep running while brushing one’s teeth. Except my foreign-born dad, who appreciated the preciousness of clean tap water. How about wetting the brush and then turning off the tap until time to rinse? Yeah, another small inconvenience that how many of us do (I do). If water were actually priced as an indispensable resource (because it really IS more valuable to life than any liquor), then maybe people would think twice about just letting it run down the drain by default.
I suppose we could collect the allowed amount of rainwater in barrels. Assuming it rains or snows. And I know that the ground needs it, so that seems like just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Got any other easy ways to conserve water as part of daily routine? You have a creative mind, so please add your ideas.
As someone who’s birth year is in my username, I don’t have conscious memory of ever not being in a long-term drought. I’m convinced my native region (born in Lubbock, TX, with a couple of family lines being among the first to settle the Panhandle) will be depopulated within my lifetime as the cotton, wheat, and dairy farmers squander what’s left the Ogallala aquifer and pray god takes care of it. I’m fairly sure America’s first major internal refugee crisis will be caused by Lake Mead dropping below operational levels.
Concerning this summer, as soon as I read La Niña was setting up, I figured the massive fires that hit the beetle kill up in this part of Colorado will hit southern Colorado this summer/fall. I’ve been telling people that Denver’s weather this summer will more closely resemble Albuquerque’s historic climate norms.
What seems to be happening is that, as the atmosphere warms up, it has the ability to store more water vapor. It takes more atmospheric instability to cause precipitation events, but when it happens, it’s torrential. The overall precipitation across the southern half of the US appears to be decreasing slightly, but because of the less even distribution of precipitation, evapotranspiration is increasing, which makes landscapes even more arid. We’re all familiar with the term “flash flood”, but get ready for “flash drought” to enter our vocabulary. Even the wet subtropical climate in the South has started experiencing these.
The Colorado watershed issue is something that will only be addressed through tense inter-state conflict and depopulation. Although Front Range municipalities own water rights west of the divide, they’re largely backup reservoirs, and most of the municipal water supply is still sourced east of divide. How the Front Range fares over the coming decades is still a coin toss. I figure the best case scenario is that precipitation will vary year-to-year from almost rainless summers to torrential monsoons, and that our dams will be heightened to have the ability to storage capacity for up to a year or two’s worth of water from the sporadic torrential monsoons.
As for how to adapt, water storage is obviously the key, as is xeriscaping. Our drainage infrastructure needs to be able to handle a season’s worth of precipitation falling in a day without letting all the water run off downstream. I keep my (small) front yard sodded for the neighbor kids to maintain and play on, but my backyard is xeriscaped. I try to water my food garden boxes with mainly rain barrel water through drip irrigation. One idea that runs through my head is that all the Victorian landscaped single-family yards could easily grow a significant portion of our food, and hopefully there will be businesses that can take advantage of that.
It’s not doom and gloom. It’s just physics at this point.
Location: We_tside PNW (Columbia Gorge) / CO / SA TX / Thailand
34,690 posts, read 57,994,855 times
Reputation: 46166
Quote:
Originally Posted by Westerner92
...
It’s not doom and gloom. It’s just physics at this point.
Paving and roofing has not been our friend to recharge the aquifers.
Fly into PHX or LAS (or DEN) to realize the abundant surface COVER of impermiable surfaces.
Fortunately, some areas of the USA have abundant moisture! (120" of drizzle in one of my locations).
Mtns, lakes, and BIG rivers too
One of my kid's makes a very good living doing seasonal Wildfire mitigation. (and has for 20+ yrs)
CR, thanks for posting the link to that blog! I’ll add it to my bookmarks.
It’s going to be a severely reduced water year for all of us here, whether for aggie or rec use. I’ve never seen reservoir and river levels this low in CO in early spring.
It is high time to emphasize little ways that household users (which is ALL people) can conserve water. Little amounts add up when multiplied by many times and many people.
1. For example, at some restaurants the servers will automatically top up water glasses whether or not you need more. Sometimes they ask before doing so, but sometimes they whisk over and pour even though you finished eating and have received the check. We can put up a hand and say, “No Thanks; I Am All Set” to avoid this top-up, which will get wasted otherwise.
2. Another one which a former neighbor told me she and husband did during an unusually dry summer in a normally not-droughty region: Put a bucket down to collect the cold but clean water that comes out of the shower or tub spigot while you wait for the water to warm up. It is drinking-quality water, sometimes gallons of it going down the drain! She saved it to water the garden with. It could also be poured into jugs or bottles to save as (*gasp*) drinking water for later use, or to rinse dishes off before washing them in detergent.
Confession: I have not yet collected preshower cold water (though I do save cold sink water and put it in hiker bottles for later) but I will so do this year. It is merely a matter of putting a clean bucket in the shower or tub and, after the shower, funneling it into jugs. Minor inconvenience—but it seems that many US people balk tremendously at small inconveniences...
3. When I grew up, nobody thought twice about letting tap water keep running while brushing one’s teeth. Except my foreign-born dad, who appreciated the preciousness of clean tap water. How about wetting the brush and then turning off the tap until time to rinse? Yeah, another small inconvenience that how many of us do (I do). If water were actually priced as an indispensable resource (because it really IS more valuable to life than any liquor), then maybe people would think twice about just letting it run down the drain by default.
I suppose we could collect the allowed amount of rainwater in barrels. Assuming it rains or snows. And I know that the ground needs it, so that seems like just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Got any other easy ways to conserve water as part of daily routine? You have a creative mind, so please add your ideas.
Thanks for the water saving tips, Pika! I must admit that I have not been very mindful about my own water use until recently. This is partly because I get an entire irrigation water share all for myself in exchange for keeping all the fruit trees around the house and out back well irrigated during the summer months. This has been a major luxury that I have become so used to that I hardly pay attention to my own need to conserve water. My water for drinking and bathing also comes for free, and I have become something of a water pig (or maybe a hippopotamus?)
It's really only starting to hit me that I will have to change my wicked water ways by yesterday, if not sooner. I grow a big veggie and herb garden every summer and when this August comes, it's all going to shrivel and die if I don't manage to come up with a plan B for getting water to my thirsty tomatoes, squash, beans, etc.
I'll post about what I manage to come up with for alternative watering methods as the growing season progresses.
As someone who’s birth year is in my username, I don’t have conscious memory of ever not being in a long-term drought. I’m convinced my native region (born in Lubbock, TX, with a couple of family lines being among the first to settle the Panhandle) will be depopulated within my lifetime as the cotton, wheat, and dairy farmers squander what’s left the Ogallala aquifer and pray god takes care of it. I’m fairly sure America’s first major internal refugee crisis will be caused by Lake Mead dropping below operational levels.
Concerning this summer, as soon as I read La Niña was setting up, I figured the massive fires that hit the beetle kill up in this part of Colorado will hit southern Colorado this summer/fall. I’ve been telling people that Denver’s weather this summer will more closely resemble Albuquerque’s historic climate norms.
What seems to be happening is that, as the atmosphere warms up, it has the ability to store more water vapor. It takes more atmospheric instability to cause precipitation events, but when it happens, it’s torrential. The overall precipitation across the southern half of the US appears to be decreasing slightly, but because of the less even distribution of precipitation, evapotranspiration is increasing, which makes landscapes even more arid. We’re all familiar with the term “flash flood”, but get ready for “flash drought” to enter our vocabulary. Even the wet subtropical climate in the South has started experiencing these.
The Colorado watershed issue is something that will only be addressed through tense inter-state conflict and depopulation. Although Front Range municipalities own water rights west of the divide, they’re largely backup reservoirs, and most of the municipal water supply is still sourced east of divide. How the Front Range fares over the coming decades is still a coin toss. I figure the best case scenario is that precipitation will vary year-to-year from almost rainless summers to torrential monsoons, and that our dams will be heightened to have the ability to storage capacity for up to a year or two’s worth of water from the sporadic torrential monsoons.
As for how to adapt, water storage is obviously the key, as is xeriscaping. Our drainage infrastructure needs to be able to handle a season’s worth of precipitation falling in a day without letting all the water run off downstream. I keep my (small) front yard sodded for the neighbor kids to maintain and play on, but my backyard is xeriscaped. I try to water my food garden boxes with mainly rain barrel water through drip irrigation. One idea that runs through my head is that all the Victorian landscaped single-family yards could easily grow a significant portion of our food, and hopefully there will be businesses that can take advantage of that.
It’s not doom and gloom. It’s just physics at this point.
I agree agree with almost everything you wrote except for the possibility of "torrential monsoons." Scientists are still debating the impact of climate warming on the North American Monsoon (NAM), but so far the consensus seems to be that as the temperatures continue to rise, the NAM will start later - September rather than July. This was what happened to last summer's (2020) monsoon - a non-event which caused the American Southwest to have its hottest and driest July–September period on record.
In addition, a late monsoon means that the parched soils of the SW do not get a chance to recharge with moisture that would have normally come with the summer rains. When the snow pack began to build last winter, it was like depositing your paycheck into a bank account which has already been overdrawn. Just as your $1,000 paycheck suddenly dwindles to a mere $500, so 40 inches of snow has no more impact than 10 inches would in a more normal year.
Your comments about Colorado's climate beginning to resemble that of Albuquerque are spot on. At this point, the average temperatures across the American Southwest have already climbed to 2C above normal with no end in sight. So, Albuquerque's climate has morphed into what Chihuahua's used to be and so on. I have lived in Colorado for more than 60 years now, and I see the changes all around me. Last summer I spotted a road runner on an empty stretch of Highway 491 south of Cortez. I've never seen a roadrunner this far north. Still, one swallow doesn't make a spring and one road runner doesn't mean that Colorado has turned into the Land of Enchantment.
However, ecologists have already observed that many species of both flora and fauna are migrating to higher elevations and/or more northerly latitudes. Colorado's iconic little pikas have been steadily migrating ever upward in search of the cooler temperatures they are more adapted to living in. Poor little guys! I have visions of them flinging themselves off the summits of the San Juans hoping to get one last breath of cool mountain air.
I have seen too many changes over my lifetime in my beloved home state to not feel a fair amount of doom and gloom. I studied both the environmental sciences and climatology when I attended the University of Colorado back in the 70's, so I can read the scientific literature and make sense of all the jargon. For a while there, I understood that climate change was a very real phenomenon, but to me it seemed a little exotic - like trying to figure out just where Schrodinger's cat was hiding or if the Heisenberg uncertainty principle meant that if I pinpointed my location on a map I would never be able to know how fast my car was going to reach my destination.
I think I was in a sort of denial about what I was seeing all around me. But one day I was driving down from the Uncompahgre Plateau toward the small town of Nucla and I began to notice how awful the stands of piñon pines alongside the road looked. The piñon pine is a keystone species in New Mexico's and Colorado's lower elevation forests. They can withstand even the most adverse of conditions and can live to be a 1,000 years old. However, a prolonged drought that began in the 1990s brought home to me the threat climate change poses to the piñon. By the early 2000s some 350 million piñons were dead, with some areas in New Mexico reporting nearly 100 percent mortality.
I later found out that we were experiencing the worst piñon kill in at least 500 years. I was staggered. If the toughest, most resilient tree species in the SW was actually starting to die off then how were all the other trees in Colorado's forests doing? The answer is that not a single species of tree native to Colorado has escaped the impact of climate change. In fact, there are huge swaths of dead standing pines all the way through the Rocky Mountains from Canada to Mexico. Colorado once had beautiful, healthy forests. No more. I could go on endlessly about all the negative impacts of climate change that I see everywhere in Colorado and in everyone of Colorado's ecosystems.
We are in very serious trouble and it's only getting worse.
The juniper might be hardier than the pinon, but they are stressed, too. And...that’s IT for the native trees here that don’t live right near a water source.
I do not consider the invasives a good substitute.
First off, the US SW is by no means the epicenter of water shortages world wide. Places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and India are much more distressed than anywhere in the US, so those places will serve as leading indicators for what could happen here. Places like Quetta Pakistan should have people falling over dead from thirst but somehow they keep growing... I really don't know how they've managed. It is really shocking how much more temperature is a limiting factor to human habitation than water, hundreds of millions of people all over the globe live in places that seem way to arid for optimal life AND people continue to flock to these places!
From what I understand the backdrop of climate change is warmer = wetter globally. To see this, look at a map of how dry the worlds climates used to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum. The notable exception being the Rocky Mountain Southwest as the jet stream bent further down during the ice age so this area had historically been wetter. Rain doesn't precipitate from the local areas evaporation, it comes from prevailing windstreams, so what happens to the prevailing winds is much more important than the localized effect of evaporation to precipitation - air doesn't sit still on the globe. If the SW dries out, I believe it will be because of permanent shifts to usual jet stream patterns, but it's not a given that the area will dry out at this point.
Warmer = more evaporation, but increased CO2 means more efficient water use in plants, especially evergreens. It's too early to say that climate change = more dead plants (assuming annual precipitation does not drop significantly) because the science around how plants react to the changes and what happens to the ground water supply just has not been explored enough. Some trees are dying of drought, but the majority are falling prey to insects here in CO, and that's much more a natural monoculture problem than a climate problem. Parasites routinely clean out monocultures (and are responsible for increased diversity). On one hand the dead trees suck, but on the other hand they are opening up the space for more grass / understory which grazers like elk and deer like, and less trees means the snow sticks around significantly longer. It's not all negative, even if it's ugly. I hope that in 50 years, there's more mixed conifer forests + more aspen that come and replace the old lodgepole and spruce forests.
Odds of the next mega blaze are highest for the eastern San Juan ranges. They have done a lot of mitigating though. Summit county has cleared itself pretty good, they have big logging operations in the Sawatch and Wet mountains... This is what the state needs more of. But I think the next 10 years will be rougher than the ones that follow; I think in 50 years the state will be in a better place naturally. I have no idea about human use and distribution though.
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