SiteLock sets this cookie to provide cloud-based website security services. In case of a drought like that of 2000-2005, Lake Mead would get 7.48 million acre-feet, worsening the structural deficit that is already causing Mead to drop by up to 12 feet a year due to the Lower Basin states chronic overuse of river water compared to supply. "That has brought everything to a head much earlier than people thought it would.". "Climate change makes these extreme weather events both more frequent and more severe, '' Matthew Casale, Environment Campaigns Director at non-profit advocacy group PIRG, previously told Newsweek. Join half a million readers enjoying Newsweek's free newsletters. Its been a vital force for the intermountain West because of its ability to store vast amounts of water and generate electricity for farmers, cities and towns in 13 states. This website uses cookies to improve your experience. But its fundamental purpose under the federal law that created it is to serve as a water insurance policy for the Colorado River Basin. Down the Colorado River lies Lake Mead, which is also seeing lower water levels than ever before. The droughts that we are seeing are becoming that much more severe because of the temperature component, theyre warmer, Bolinger said. The lake avoided serious problems during the drought because, in 1999, it was almost full. If allocations from the Colorado River dip below the levels necessary for some customers to receive hydropower, the real question [becomes] what can our grid accommodate from a hydropower perspective in terms of compensating production losses from Glen Canyon? said Justin Mankin, an assistant professor of geography at Dartmouth College. So, what would happen if Lake Powell dried up? It sucks up moisture from forests, backyard gardens and crop fields with greater intensity. Lake Mead's level is 1,047 feet above sea level. Is climate change the same thing as global warming? Understanding and explaining the depth of the dryness is up to climate scientists throughout the basin. Some of Americas largest cities depend on the water from Lake Mead. Lake Powell is in crisis. Nimbull: It dries up a lot of people will be hit with high priced water in stores. And it takes several years of good weather in order to bring the system out of drought. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. LinkedIn sets this cookie to store performed actions on the website. The reality is that it's probably too little, too late.. For context, on the scale of no drought to worst drought, theres no category that captures conditions more dry than exceptional. The lake was just under 24 percent full as of. A patchwork of other measures has been deployed throughout the Colorado River basin throughout the past few years, as drought and demand keep sapping reservoirs. The water in Lake Powell is low because the amount of water in the Colorado River has been falling for decades. But the warming temperatures that were seeing make it considerably worse than it would have been. Below 3,490 feet of elevation, Lake Powell dips into a zone where the generation of hydropower by water flowing through the Glen Canyon Dam becomes unreliable. This cookie, set by YouTube, registers a unique ID to store data on what videos from YouTube the user has seen. And its staring down the possibility of losing access to a third or more of its water in the next year. A . People should definitely not feel like the agencies managing the Colorado River have it under control, he said. It's partly that there's less rain and snow, partly that as temperatures rise, plants use more water and more water evaporates out of the soil which would otherwise have ended up in the river. Kathryn Sorensen, research director at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, said it will push water managers further in the direction of finding more permanent solutions. As an imbalance between water supplies and demands grows in the region, KUNC is committed to covering the stories that emerge. Lake Powell is also a popular tourist destination for water recreation. If water levels at Lake Powell drop just another 32 feet, those generators will stop spinning. It is forecast to have a new record low next summer, saidHasencamp. How does climate change affect you? Is this as bad as climate change is going to get in shrinking the snowpacks in the headwaters? Newsweek previously reported that Lake Mead's dead pool level is 895 feet, while Lake Powell's is 3,370. The dropping water levels are indicated by white marks on the canyon wall, often likened to a bathtub ring. The Lower Basins legal share is 7.5 million acre feet a year. The lake that once covered 400 square miles has shrunk 90 percent, leaving behind oxygen-deprived, highly salinized water with a rotten-egg odor that permeates the surrounding area. "This is apparently a decent (water) year, but still, if it turns dry again there are some pretty big reductions on tap and every state could be affected," saidHasencamp. Lakes in the Colorado River Basin are drying up and losing water, with severe water cuts now expected across four states - the start of a water crisis in the West. . In this column provided by Writers on the Range . Newsweek reached out to the Central Arizona Project for comment. Are experts looking at this saying, its just going to get worse in the Colorado River basin? AWSALB is an application load balancer cookie set by Amazon Web Services to map the session to the target. California broke from six other Western states in proposal to cut Colorado River use as water levels reach historic lows. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Theyre roughly 25% full now, saidBrad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University. Lake Mead and Lake Powell rise and fall together, said Chuck Cullom, the Central Arizona Projects Colorado River programs manager. John Dankosky works with the radio team to create our weekly show, and is helping to build our State of Science Reporting Network. Given todays changing climate, led by continued warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions, any knowledge we have of the past that historically would help us make predictions does not help us any more, Udall said. The increase in temperatures means the atmosphere is thirstier. Experts say that the reservoir may dry up completely in a few decades. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. And as we warm even further, it makes it that much harder for our infrastructure, our water storage, to recover. Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. Falling water levels at Lake Mead and Lake Powell have been concerning for several years. Lake Powell has been called "Jewel of the Colorado" by the federal agency that built it, the Bureau of Reclamation. Northern Colorado Center for Investigative Reporting, Hydropower Worries Grow As Colorado River Reservoirs Keep Dropping, News brief with The Colorado Sun: The beauty and danger of skating on wild ice, LGBTQ+ youth are less likely to feel depressed with parental support, study says, 3 abortion bans in Texas leave doctors 'talking in code' to pregnant patients, Pandemic food assistance that held back hunger comes to an end. And its split into two watersheds. Kathleen Davis is a producer at Science Friday, which means she spends the week brainstorming, researching, and writing, typically in that order. Its companion reservoir, Lake Mead, is at levels almost as low. "We can make up energy through fossil fuels, but if we fall short on water, we have to restrict supply because there are little to no replacements," he said. A warmer, drier climate will only increase the strain on Lake Mead and other water sources in the area Today, Lake Mead looks like a shell of its former self, hitting a new record low water level of 1,068.08 feet above sea level, according to a report from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. . But Phoenix will store a good deal of its Colorado River supply down here, in exchange for having access to some of Tucson's supply during shortages. The U.S. Department of the Interior is considering a plan to keep extra water in Lake Powell. These ICS uses, at the high end, amount to two and a half feet of elevation in Lake Mead. This summer, the water. While levels are on a long downward trend, they fluctuate with the seasons. That leaves a sizable deficit and little time to turn things around. Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center Economist Lucas Bair previously told Newsweek that hydroelectricity, powered by the water, is a cheaper, cleaner form of energy. This segment is part ofThe State of Science, a series featuring science stories from public radio stations across the United States. LinkedIn sets this cookie to remember a user's language setting. This cookie is used for load balancing purposes. If Lake Powell recedes much further, one of the nations largest reservoirs could be at risk of no longer generating hydropower for the region. Such is the nature of the climate change beast that we have unleashed.. YSC cookie is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages. And data updated Monday from the California Department of Water Resources' tracker show the reservoir climbing to 60%, still below historical levels for February 72% but significantly higher than it had been. In . This cookie, set by Cloudflare, is used to support Cloudflare Bot Management. In those cases, what's revealed is the dry and dusty lake-bedwhich can be a problem in its own right. It is not creating certainty in the water market, Mankin said. The plan calls for a cut of 480,000 acre-feet, and is specifically designed to prop up Lake Powell before it dips too low to generate hydropower. The repercussions of a draining water supply are immense -- farms are drying up, a once-thriving marina now sits more than a mile from lake water and Arizona's Department of Water Resources is . He and his wife have four cats, thousands of bees, and a yoga studio in the sleepy Northwest hills of Connecticut. As water levels fall in the reservoirs and river, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has implemented a tiered shortage system to reduce the allocated amount certain regions in the lower basin receive from the river to preserve water. Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. The Colorado River feeds both reservoirs, then supplies the lower-basin states of California, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico with water. This cookie is used to manage the interaction with the online bots. They've been ignoring the problem coming for decades and decades. Newsweek previously. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage. The test_cookie is set by doubleclick.net and is used to determine if the user's browser supports cookies. Just as water demand is going up, the supply is going down. Now what? The word unprecedented gets thrown around a lot in discussions about the Colorado River these days, and this is no exception. This drought will only be exacerbated by climate change, as the increased global temperatures are expected to increase the severity of drought weather and frequencies of wildfires, as well as influencing a vast range of other extreme weather events. LinkedIn sets the lidc cookie to facilitate data center selection. The second would step up cloud-seeding programs to try to boost snowfall in the region. The first warning sign would come if a drought pushed the lake below 3,525 feet, almost 85 feet below where it is now. So Luke, I dont know is this all just because of climate change? At its height, the lake surface sits over 1,200 feet (365 meters) above sea level. ", States that use Colorado River Basin water mandated to cut use. "Arizona is, to a greater or lesser degree, selling water to California," CAP attorney said of the later-killed deal. Because of that, the spring and early summer will bring a temporary boost to water levels while snow runs into rivers and eventually flows into Lake Powell. Mead was created when the Hoover Dam was completed in 1935. Azure sets this cookie for routing production traffic by specifying the production slot. He has mostly covered environmental stories since 2005, focusing on water supplies, climate change, the Rosemont Mine and the endangered jaguar. They both use water from the Colorado River. The JSESSIONID cookie is used by New Relic to store a session identifier so that New Relic can monitor session counts for an application. Its also headed toward a record low later this year. You cant do that with groundwater. If Lake Powell recedes much further, one of the nation's largest reservoirs could be at risk of no longer generating hydropower for the region. The TiPMix cookie is set by Azure to determine which web server the users must be directed to. Back-to-back dry years years with below-average runoff have left little water in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, a reservoir upstream. This is very unpredictable and these are going to be difficult conversations in the coming years., THE HILL 1625 K STREET, NW SUITE 900 WASHINGTON DC 20006 | 202-628-8500 TEL | 202-628-8503 FAX. A drought that has gripped the Southwest is creeping the nation's two largest reservoirs toward a dead pool, which would have catastrophic consequences for water users in the Colorado River's lower basin. And it doesnt allow ratepayers who rely on power production from the canyon to be forward-thinking and operate under conditions of certainty., Cities, farmers and fish all need certainty when it comes to water, and this is the opposite of certainty, Hawes said. Lake Powell is hemmed by the Glen Canyon Dam, which generates hydroelectric power via the dam's water flowing through the dam back into the Colorado River. Correction: A previous version of this story indicated that 3,490 feet is Lake Powell's "dead pool" level. First of all Lake Powell is not gonna dry up. The shoreline it creates, in a red rock desert, is longer than the entire U.S. West Coast.. Lake Mead's water levels were 1,047.38 feet as of February 23. But even some creosote is dying, unable to take the one-two punch of both the hottest and driest conditions on record last year in parts of Arizona. Luke covers the Colorado River basin. This cookie is used for storing country code selected from country selector. "I've been here since 2007 and obviously this is way lower than I've ever seen it.". Alex is KUNC's reporter covering the Colorado River Basin. We called several of them and asked for discrete numbers that capture the current state of the Colorado River basin. Even hardy desert plants, the ones well-adapted to water scarcity, have struggled. Big Water, Utah It's hard to believe a place as beautiful as Lake Powell is also a shadow of its former self. This is very unpredictable and these are going to be difficult conversations in the coming years.. She said the very fact that officials in Washington, D.C. are getting involved underscores the urgency of Lake Powells crisis. YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The Santa Cruz River is now a giant bed of dust and sand. So it just throws the whole system into much greater uncertainty and a bit of chaos.. Join half a million readers enjoying Newsweek's free newsletters. And that group includes the Navajo Nation, the Southern Ute tribe, the Quechan Indian tribe. The two. On the contrary, he said, its actually become this locus of huge uncertainty, which doesnt allow downstream users to make effective plans, because they dont know what their allocations are going to be. And so when you have snow thats melting off, it gets soaked up into the ground before it flows into a river or flows into a reservoir. What would constitute that? works with the radio team to create our weekly show, and is helping to build our State of Science Reporting Network. Stock image of Alstrom Point, Lake Powell. A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface. The pattern element in the name contains the unique identity number of the account or website it relates to. But a new study warns that the lake could virtually dry up in as few as six years if the region gets a repeat of the dry spell it experienced from 2000 to 2005. JOHN DANKOSKY: So obviously, people are preparing for worse times. This cookie is installed by Google Universal Analytics to restrain request rate and thus limit the collection of data on high traffic sites. Share on Facebook; . The lower basin is made up of Arizona, Nevada, and California. BACKGROUND: Western water crisis looms as California complicates critical water deal. But the last time it was anywhere close to that level was 1999. Luke, well continue to follow your reporting. Its 90% of the water supply to Las Vegas, 50% to Phoenix, effectively 100% to Tucson and 25% to Los Angeles, said Udall. This cookie is set by Facebook to display advertisements when either on Facebook or on a digital platform powered by Facebook advertising, after visiting the website. When its needed its released to Lake Mead and the three Lower Basin states. Thousands of Tucson homes use 250% more water than you. At its highest, in 1983, the lake was 3,708 feet above sea level. This cookie is managed by Amazon Web Services and is used for load balancing. Correction 01/16/23 10:56 a.m. If the lakes levels drop below 3,490, Hawes added, the Bureau of Reclamation will have to run water through a series of river outlet tubes, the lowest delivery mechanism in the lake, for the first time since the 1980s, and bureau officials dont actually know if they can handle that much water, she said. Welcome back to Science Friday, Luke. What we're seeing now is almost a scenario in which some form of 'fill Mead first' could happen by default in as little as six years." Between the drought years of 2000-2005, Lake Powell lost 13 . So the question is, how bad is it going to get? The second largest reservoir in the U.S. by total capacity after Lake Mead, Lake Powell spans the Utah/Arizona border, and is an artificial lake created from damming the Colorado River. Used to provide cloud-based website security Services Bot Management I dont know is this as as. 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