Los Angeles Times – Colorado River crisis is so bad, lakes Mead and Powell are unlikely to refill in our lifetimes
Click here to read the Los Angeles Times article
Lakes Mead and Powell are some of America’s largest reservoirs and are relied on for both agricultural water supply and hydroelectric energy generation. A new article by the Los Angeles Times discusses the effects of lower water levels in these reservoirs. The last 23 years have been a “megadrought” for the region, and water levels are not expected to increase any time soon. Despite deeper snowpack in the Sierra Nevada this year compare to recent decades, it won’t be enough to turn this crisis around. Lake Mead is currently sitting at 30% capacity while Lake Powell is even lower at 23% capacity.
Not only are these reservoirs crucial for water supply but Lake Powell also drains through the Glen Canyon Dam, generating power. The drought combined with increased water demand has led to these critically low reservoir levels. Part of this can be attributed to climate change, with increasing temperatures and changes to precipitation patterns impacting the hydrology of river systems. “In the last 23 years, as rising temperatures have intensified the drought, the river’s flow has declined about 20%”. Experts estimate that a global temperature rise of 1 degree Celsius would result in a significant decrease in river flow, around 9%. Even if the Colorado Basin were to get a series of wet years, it would take way more than that to refill the river. Scientists have been warning that this could happen for years, and now policymakers must make some tough decisions to protect this resource.
Although the Canada1Water project is not specific to this region, climate change is impacting water resource around the world. This continental scale modelling framework produced by the Canada1Water project focus on groundwater and surface water interactions and how climate change is impacting water resources systems across the country. Results of the project will be communicated through an open-access decision support framework to give policymakers the tools to help them make smart decisions regarding Canada’s water resources, and ideally prevent situations like the Colorado River crisis from impacting Canadians.
Want to learn more about the long-term, climate-change impacts on the Colorado River Basin? Click here to read an article co-authored by Brad Udall (quoted extensively in this LA Times article) - “The twenty-first century Colorado River hot drought and implications for the future”
“To think that these [reservoirs] would ever refill requires some kind of leap of faith that I, for one, don’t have.”
“They’re not going to refill. The only reason they filled the first time is because there wasn’t demand for the water. In the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, there was no Central Arizona Project, there was no Southern Nevada Water Authority, there was not nearly as much use in the Upper [Colorado River] Basin. So the water use was low. So that filled up storage.”
“The last 23 years are the best lessons we have right now, and they should scare the pants off of people,”