What A Snow Drought In The West Means For The Rest Of 2026

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, it’s Flora Lichtman, and you’re listening to Science Friday. While those of us in the Northeast have been shoveling our sidewalks again and again and again this winter, the Western US is in a snow drought. Snowpack in Colorado and Utah has been at record lows, and people are freaked out about it, not only because it hurts winter sports and those businesses. That’s the tip of the melting iceberg.

Here to tell us more is David Condos, reporter at KUER Public Radio, based in St. George, Utah. Hey, David.

DAVID CONDOS: Hi, Flora.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK. Would you agree with my assessment that people are freaked out?

DAVID CONDOS: I think that is a fair and accurate assessment for Utah, yeah. It’s definitely the topic of conversation. People are talking about it. It’s the small talk that comes up at the grocery store or you pass somebody on the sidewalk. It’s a big deal.

Utah, as you may have heard, kind of bills itself as the greatest snow on Earth. It takes great pride. It’s a big part of the economy. A big part of the culture here is winter sports.

But yeah, even just you’re not a skier, we can see the mountains wherever we go. I can see the mountains from my house, and that’s the case for a lot of Utahns. And so just seeing them either bald or with less snow than usual or intermittent snow through the winter is just this kind of weird, constant reminder of the situation that we’re in.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And it goes way beyond winter sports. What’s the concern here?

DAVID CONDOS: Yeah, yeah. So the big concern, and I think a lot of Utahns are aware of this, is our water supply. It’s hard to overstate how important snow is for our water in Utah. The state estimates that 95% of our water supply for cities and communities comes from melting snow.

This is the desert. We don’t get a lot of rain. We don’t have a lot of big rivers that are running year round. And so we really need this melting snow to refill our reservoirs, the reservoirs that cities depend on, and then the big ones, like Lake Powell, which is this critical key of the Colorado River system.

And so essentially just, without snow, we just don’t have much water supply. This is like our shot every year to get this snow and then to have it come down nice and easy in the spring and summer to trickle into those reservoirs.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wow. So the stakes are high because it’s not just your water supply, right?

DAVID CONDOS: Yeah. Well, this is part of the upper Colorado River basin here in Utah. And so yeah, when Colorado and Utah and these mountain states that are the headwaters for the Colorado River system are having a bad year, then, yeah, that’s bad for tens of millions of people from Los Angeles to Phoenix to all over the place because, like I mentioned, Lake Powell is already very, very low.

People probably remember the headlines from the past few years. And so if it’s already low and then it’s not going to get refilled to the level that we would hope it would get, then, yeah, that just puts more strain on everything. And yeah, it’s the whole West.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Does it feel existential?

DAVID CONDOS: Oh, I think it’s very up in your face. With the Colorado River negotiations going on right now, like you said, the stakes are very high. It is hard to look away from how important this is. And yeah, I think existential is certainly a good word for it. It’s kind of like, well, if this is what we’re having this year and science tells us years like this may come around more often as we go into the future, what does that mean for a place like Utah, where people love to live but it’s just a very dry state?

FLORA LICHTMAN: David Condos, reporter at KUER Public Radio, based in St. George, David, thanks for filling us in.

DAVID CONDOS: Yeah. Thank you, Flora.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: We have to take a quick break, but when we come back, we’re unpacking this snowpack problem with an expert who has spent his career studying water in the West. Don’t go away.

What does the snow drought mean for the future of life out West? Up next, sifting through some of the granular details of this hydrology story, like, how unusual is this year’s snow drought? And what are the downstream effects, including the impact on the ongoing Colorado River negotiations?

Here with me is Brad Udall. He’s spent his career untangling how climate change is affecting hydrology in the American West. He’s a research scientist at Colorado State University. Brad, welcome to the show.

BRAD UDALL: Thanks for having me.

DAVID CONDOS: So how historic is this year’s low snowpack?

BRAD UDALL: Well, it’s grim, and it may not be the worst on record, but it’s darn close. In the case of the Colorado River, the two worst years we’ve seen, 1976-77 and ’80-81. Those are two really bad years, and if this continues, we might actually end up below the flows of those two years.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Is this just about precipitation or temperature too?

BRAD UDALL: No, there’s a huge temperature signal in this, and of course, it’s anthropogenic. It’s human caused. So what we’ve seen out West since October is about temperatures 5 Fahrenheit warmer than normal, which is a lot. It may not sound like a lot, but it is. Here in Colorado, in December, it was 10 Fahrenheit warmer than normal.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wow.

BRAD UDALL: And this is part of this ongoing trend of the American West, especially in the Colorado River, where it’s a lot warmer, and that warmth has all kinds of implications for the future.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wow. We’ve been using the term snow drought. Is drought the right word to describe what’s happening?

BRAD UDALL: It’s really not. So drought is something that’s temporary, and in the 20th century, we had floods and droughts, floods and droughts. But the real word we need to start using is a mouthful. It’s aridification, and it means the long-term warming and drying that we’ve been seeing since the year 2000.

And there’s a whole bunch of stuff with aridification– shorter winters, longer summers, more heat on any given day, more evaporation, more rain, less snow. There’s a whole list of it, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing. And this year is just yet one more indication of this aridification trend.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How precisely do we understand the link between anthropogenic climate change and what is happening, for instance, this season out West?

BRAD UDALL: So part of it we understand, and part of it we don’t. So we really understand well these higher temperatures. There’s no doubt these higher temperatures are related to greenhouse gas emissions. It’s up almost 3 Fahrenheit in the Colorado River basin since 1970. It’s going to double that by 2050, believe it or not.

The second part of the equation that we don’t understand is precipitation. Why is this precipitation down? And since the year 2000, in the Colorado River basin, the precipitation is down about 7% per year.

None of it is actually in the winter. The December, January, February period, the core winter out here, we’re getting our normal precipitation, but the rest of the year we’re seeing these declines. And it may very well turn out that these declines are in fact human caused, but the science right now is uncertain about that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: We heard from David, our last guest, that Utah gets 95% of its water from snowpack. What are some of the other longer-term impacts of this year’s lack of snow?

BRAD UDALL: So there’s a whole bunch of them, and they’re all pretty depressing. So one thing we’re going to see is a whole bunch of–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Buckle up, listeners.

BRAD UDALL: Yep. One thing we’re going to see this summer is a whole bunch of fires. And I’ll tell you, if you live out West, big fire seasons are not something to be looked forward to.

I remember here in 2021, driving through an orange Martian landscape in the middle of the day as the Continental Divide burned just to the West of us. So fires for sure.

Less soil moisture, which makes it harder on wildlife and on plants and on farmers. And in the case of the Colorado River, it means less water for the 40 million people that use this system. And that’s part of these ongoing negotiations about how we’re going to share the required cutbacks in Colorado River use.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Does this year make those negotiations more urgent?

BRAD UDALL: It sure does. In the year 2000, the nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, were completely chock full, and they’re now 70% empty. All the rules and regulations around the operation of those reservoirs expire this year, and on top of that, we have this incredibly crummy snowpack. So the urgency is there to get a deal done. But unfortunately, we haven’t seen any progress on these negotiations.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So for these negotiations over the Colorado River, how much water use reduction are we talking about?

BRAD UDALL: So since the year 2000, the nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Mead, have lost 70% of their supply. And the river is down 20%. Of that 20%, half is due to higher temperatures, and the remaining half is due to this reduction in precipitation, which may or may not be human caused.

We are now talking, to get the system in balance, very large reductions of somewhere around the order of the decline in flow. So around the order of about 20% of river use is what we’re looking at. But because we anticipate more reductions in Colorado River flow, we may need to account fully for a 40% loss of the river flow, and those are cutbacks that would affect all entities that use Colorado River water.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I guess I’m wondering. That seems beyond whether someone takes a long shower. We must be talking about agriculture at this point.

BRAD UDALL: In the Colorado River basin, as is the case in almost every arid river system around the world, about 70% of the water is used by agriculture, and the remaining 30% is used by municipalities and industry. And the size of the needed cuts to solve this problem mean that you can’t do this just by dealing with municipalities and industry. Agriculture is going to have to take the lion’s share of these cuts, and that means very fundamental changes in how agriculture operates in the American Southwest.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Like what? Very fundamental changes it doesn’t exist to the same degree, or what are those changes?

BRAD UDALL: So in the case of Arizona, which unfortunately is a junior water rights holder, in the case of the Colorado River, a whole bunch of agriculture on that state, unfortunately, is going to have to go away. This is agriculture in the center part of the state.

But even that probably doesn’t solve the solution. And I think what you’re going to see is other parts of the agricultural system are going to either have to go out of business or are going to have to change alternative crops or maybe grow crops only some times of the year. In the lower basin, that may be in the cooler months of the year, where those crops are really valuable, and not so much in the hotter months, when less valuable crops are grown.

So I think we’re going to get to do a rethink on agriculture, and it’s going to be painful, unfortunately. But that’s the only way you solve this problem, is a big contribution from ag.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s so devastating, obviously, to farmers who work in these areas. Do people dispute this? Is there a controversy over whether that is the direction that we will ultimately need to go?

BRAD UDALL: Oh, yeah. Well, this is highly contentious, and it’s why the seven states have not been able to agree on anything that looks like a solution. And in the case of Arizona, the cuts may be so big that ultimately some long-existing agriculture along the Colorado River that has senior rights may have to give away so that municipalities in the center part of the state that have junior water rights can actually continue to get access to water.

And this is like the third rail in Arizona. This is a really big deal, to transfer water out of ag into the central part of the state where everybody lives. But it’s both politically and economically necessary.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Are there efficiencies in water usage that are on the table that could help solve this?

BRAD UDALL: Maybe, but most people actually get this wrong. Water is not like gasoline where you get one chance to use it and, by gosh, you better make sure that use is efficient. It’s a little appreciated in water use that a lot of water that’s actually applied to agriculture actually runs off the field and ends up back in a river downstream and gets to be reused.

So when you look at things in agriculture that nominally look inefficient, like flood irrigation, you’re neglecting the fact that water has what’s called return flows, that it actually ends up back in the river and gets rediverted by some downstream water user. And oftentimes water efficiency measures, believe it or not, actually lead to increases in water use, not reductions, paradoxically.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Oh, that’s fascinating. I think we also often hear that the water crisis is related to people moving to cities out West. Is that true?

BRAD UDALL: No, it’s not true at all. And a classic case would be Las Vegas, which has cut their water use by about a third since around 1980 yet having twice the population. The story of municipalities around the American West is that they have pursued these very slow “1% per year” efficiency improvements from toilets and low flow shower heads and more efficient washers and the like.

And over 50 years or 40 plus years, those “1% per year” increases really add up. And so you end up with a Las Vegas, that’s serving twice as many customers with 2/3 the amount of water that they did 40 or 50 years ago.

FLORA LICHTMAN: If there’s no consensus on these Colorado River negotiations, what happens? What happens for the people living and relying on this water?

BRAD UDALL: So what you’re going to see, I believe, is the federal government’s going to impose a solution, and nobody’s going to that solution. Litigation will start. A lot of the litigation will be states putting stakes in the ground for their particular rights that they want to preserve.

Hopefully the negotiations will continue in the background. And at some point, we will get a negotiated compromise. The lesson from one of the last times there was big litigation in the Colorado River, back in the 1960s, is that the courts are completely inadequate to solve a problem like this that involves, again, 40 million people, seven different states, 30 Indian tribes, two nations. Mexico is a part of this as well.

A court just can’t get this right. It’s way too complicated, and you’re far better off with a negotiated solution. But unfortunately, right now, the parties to this negotiation are really far apart.

FLORA LICHTMAN: With climate change, there’s always been this often-repeated line. If we fail to act, this and this will happen. Do you feel like we’re past that, like we’re now just into adaptation land?

BRAD UDALL: In the case of the Colorado River, we’re going to get to adapt. That’s very clearly the case. But to give up on reducing our greenhouse gas emissions is completely silly and counterproductive and stupid, frankly.

So no, we’re not beyond the need or the ability to act to stop this. But in the case of the Colorado River, we’ve dug ourselves a really big hole here, and it’s going to take a whole lot of work to climb out of it. And unfortunately, any actions around reducing greenhouse gases wouldn’t be timely in this case.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Brad Udall is a water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University. Brad, thanks for joining me today.

BRAD UDALL: My pleasure.

FLORA LICHTMAN: This episode was produced by Kathleen Davis. And if you a friend who’s in a podcast drought– I’m sorry. Is that a bad joke? I’m trying to lighten the mood here– why not recommend Science Friday to them?

Please help us get the word out about the show. And if you have questions or topics you want us to investigate, please give us a ring. 877-4-SCIFRI. Thanks for listening. I’m Flora Lichtman.

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