Wet, Snowy Western Winter Not Enough To End Water Shortage

Snow water equivalent - the amount of "rain" in the
existing snow pack, is definitely above normal in 
the mountains in the Colorado River basin, but
years of heavy precipitation is needed to end
the drought and low water levels in important reservoirs.

 Over the past year, we've seen a lot of news about low levels in the Colorado River, and now Lake Mead and Lake Powell had gotten to dangerously low levels. 

That situation endangers water supplies for something like 40 million people. Since the dams in front of the two lakes normally generate lots of electricity, even the grid out west has been threatened. 

This isn't just a problem for western states supplied by the Colorado River. If things get really bad out there with water shortages and electrical generation, the economic ripple effects would be felt nationwide, and probably worldwide. Including here in the Brave Little State of Vermont. 

However, as you also might have heard, or seen in this here blog thingy, there's been a welcome ton of rain and mountain snow out west, including in much of the Colorado River basin.

Water levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell have crept up a little this winter. And, if the spring snow melt behaves well, a little bit more water will enter to the two giant reservoirs.

So all good, right?

Um, no.

The region that includes the Colorado River basin has been in a more than two-decade long mega-drought. One winter with great precipitation does not erase something like that. It would take years and years of wet weather to set things right. 

Though drought has eased in the West, it's still definitely
a factor as the latest U.S. Drought Monitor, released
on February 2, shows. 

The latest weekly U.S. Drought Monitor, most recently issued Thursday, indicates that much of the West remains in drought despite the recent storms. Though the drought has diminished some since the autumn. 

Climate change has made the West hotter, and generally drier. Hotter weather creates more evaporation, so things dry out more quickly. This winter's rain and snow is bucking the trend of a drier climate. 

That could just be a part of natural variability superimposed on the drier climate. Chances are, this stormy western winter could be just a temporary reprieve. 

As Yale Climate Connections notes:

"Some experts worry it could further delay the hard work that managers of the watershed must do to keep it healthy and make its service more inclusive as the climate grows hotter and more parched.

'As soon as water supplies increase, people tend to stop paying attention,' said Kathy Jacobs, director of the University of Arizona's Center for Climate Adaption Science and Solutions said in an interview. 'I hope people realize that even one year of good flows doesn't mean we have a trend in that direction. We really need a long-term solution.'"

Decades old water usage agreements among western states are based on river gauge readings between 1900 and 1920.

That basis is way too optimistic considering scientists have since found that those 20 years more than a century ago were among the wettest in 1,400 years. 

Oops. 

The drought, and low water levels in Lakes Mead and Powell got so low by last June that the U.S. Department of the Interior demanded states that use water from the Colorado River come up with a plan that sharply reduces usage. 

That agreement is still in the works, though Yale Climate Connections notes it's good that at least the states agree sharp cutbacks are needed, even if they don't yet agree on just how to accomplish that. 

For more info, read the entire Yale Climate Connections article here.

 

Extreme Western Drought Might Solve A Few Old Murder Cases

Lake Mead along the Colorado River has receded so
much from drought that a body was found in a barrel.
Police suspect the murder happened in the late 1970s
or early 1980s. The lake has gotten so low the 
barrel has only now been discovered 
Photo from KLSA 

UPDATE:

Sure enough, as Lake Mead's water continues to recede in that extreme western drought, another body has been discovered. 

A couple of women paddling in the low lake found the skeletal remains on a sand bar. 

Unlike the previous find, officials don't think this one involves foul play. Still it will be investigated.

If the lake keeps receding, I wonder how many more long lost bodies/people will be found?

PREVIOUS MESSAGE 

That punishing drought in the West has brought storied Lake Mead to its lowest levels on record.  Possible water shortages loom for large portions of the West Coast, the southern and central Rockies and the Desert Southwest as no real drought relief seems to be in the offing. 

It'll be a long, hot and rather scary summer in this area.

f you're stretching for any hint of a bright side to this drought, here's one.  It's possible low water levels could held solve some cold murder cases.

For instance, the water recently receded so much that a rusted barrel emerged from the water. Inside were the skeletal remains of a murder victim.  Police said judging from clothing and other evidence, the person was murdered and dumped into Lake Mead sometimes during the 1980s Las Vegas Metro Police homicide Lt. Ray Spencer told television station KLAS.  

"'It's going to be a very difficult case,' Spencer said. 'I would say there is a very good chance as the water level drops that we are going to find additional human remains.'

That, unfortunately makes sense. Lake Mead is only 40 miles or so from Las Vegas.  That city is famous for lots of things, including gambling murders and mob hits.   Lake Mead would be an incredibly convenient place to dump a body, never to be seen again.

Unless the region were hit by the worst drought in at least1,200 years, which is exactly what is happening now.  Yep, I said 1,200 years. The last time it was this bad in the west was around the year 1000.

This mega-drought, defined as a drought lasting a couple to a few decades is influence by climate change. 

As Scientific American reports, there probably would be a drought going on now in the West without climate change, but the burning of fossil fuels has made things much worse than they otherwise would be.

"'It probably wouldn't even be a continuous drought,' said Benjamin Cook, a NASA climate scientist and co-author of the new study, published in Nature Climate Change. 'We still would have had a drought. It sill would have been reasonably bad. But it would be nowhere near the record-breaking even that we're seeing right now.'"

Back in the Colorado River basin, which includes Lake Mead, 98.3 percent of the basin is currently in drought and 26.6 percent of it is in extreme or exceptional drought. More than 80 percent of the basin has been in drought since July, 2020, according to NOAA's National Integrated Drought Information System.

Which means this will soon turn into a crisis far worse than discovered homicide victims in receding lakes.  

Crunch Time In Western Drought: A Permanent Drought Could Become A Permanent National Crisis

"Bathtub Ring" in Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam shows how
low the water is, and how high it should be. If this keeps up
for a few more years, we have a national crisis.

 Here in Vermont, the drought we were enduring this spring and early summer is nearly gone. Northern areas still need quite a bit of rain, but at least it's better.  

Not much rain is in the forecast, but there is hope that autumn storms will come along and wet us down further. Our drought in northern Vermont is not the biggest possible crisis.  

Out west, meanwhile, the situation is turning more dire.  You might have heard about those wonderful monsoon thunderstorms that created some flash floods in the Southwest this summer.  That might have led some people to believe the drought is ending out there, too.

Not a chance.  The summer thunderstorms lessened, but did not eliminate the drought in a few sections of Arizona.  But most of the heavy rain consisted of local downpours that swept down mountain slopes and canyons but didn't create any widespread wetting.  The storms were a drop in the bucket. 

Extreme drought lives on.  The only hope for relief comes this winter.  Normally, large storms crank through the West over the colder months, causing widespread rain and mountain snow.  They'll need many, many such storms this winter to ease this long lasting drought.  One wet winter will not be nearly enough to solve the problem. You'll need a string of them. 

For what it's worth, long range seasonal outlooks from NOAA paint a grim picture in the Southwest. They call for persistent dry weather all winter out there. Worse, the forecasts call for above normal temperatures, which increase evaporation and can make droughts even more dire.

Granted, long range forecasts months in advance can easily be inaccurate, but the early thinking is bad.

Until now, real people have not been super affected by this southwestern drought, but that's changing. 

When Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam, is totally full, the water is 1,225 feet deep. Now, it's down to 1,075 feet or even a little lower than that.  That means conservation orders are in effect in parts of Arizona and farmers are now starting to have to let fields go fallow for lack of irrigation.

That's bad enough. But if this slow-motion disaster goes on for a few more years, it turns into a national crisis.

The drought that is making Lakes Mead and Powell so low was not just a one or two year affair, like the relatively minor drought we've had in Vermont.

The western drought has been building for a decade or more.  Climate change might well have permanently made the West hotter and drier than it once was.  So the winter rains could very well continue to fail indefinitely.

Experts are saying that climate change is making the weather more extreme. You might get a brief super wet period in which torrential rains hit the West, causing some serious flooding and briefly interrupting the slow decline of western reservoirs. 

But if climate scientists are right, we'll have to stop wondering if the explosive population growth over the past several decades in the Southwest was really such a good idea.

According to the Arizona Republic, there's a 41 percent chance Lake Mead water will be so low by 2025 that big cities like Phoenix could see sharply curtailed water supplies. And, if current projections hold, there's a one in five chance that by 2025, Hoover Dam, which holds back Lake Mead, will have to stop producing hydropower.

If that happens, electricity for 1.3 million people gets cut off.  Upstream Lake Powell might have to shut off the electric turbines due to low water by 2023.  There goes another source of electricity for 1.5 million people. 

The shortages of water and electricity at the very least could make life more difficult for millions of people. Some might become "climate refugees,"  leaving the Southwest for wetter, more hospitable parts of the United States.

This is a sign that the crap is hitting the fan with climate change. You can imagine the social and political upheaval if western drought causes large scale population shifts and migrations. This would affect us all, so the western drought is not just "their problem."

Remember, one study I wrote about recently suggested Vermont is one of the so-called "safer" places as climate change takes hold.  Will we get an influx of climate refugees?

Sure, with labor shortages and and aging population, a small surge of young, industrious people to the Green Mountain State would probably be a good thing overall.  But what if we see thousands upon thousands of people moving here at once?

This won't happen immediately, of course. It'll be a generational thing.  But great minds will have to plan for both what to do to confront the likely permanent drought in the Southwest. And they''ll have to figure out what to do about the widespread societal impacts that the drought and other effects of disastrous climate change might bring. 

We are obviously an already deeply divided nation.  We've divvied ourselves into mutually hostile tribes. That's not a recipe for cooperation.

We failed as a nation handling the pandemic, as we resorted to political hackery and profiteering, with deadly results. So what are the chances we'll get our act together and figure out as one nation how to confront the societal effects of climate change? Societal effects that might make the pandemic seem like a blip on the radar?

I'm not optimistic.