Mountain snow-melting intensified this week with an unusually abrupt “flick of the switch” from cold to hot, leading to flooding that on Thursday cut off northwestern Colorado’s main transportation route and forced a shutdown of schools
This may help California, Arizona and Nevada, the lower-basin states that rely heavily on the river for city and agricultural water. The Lake Powell reservoir has fallen to 22% of its capacity, the lowest since it was filled following the 1963 completion of the dam across the top of the Grand Canyon, and federal authorities are considering cuts to manage the depletion there and in an equally depleted Lake Mead.
“But we’re not expecting Lake Powell, or Lake Mead, to fill up. Those reservoirs are enormous, and the deficits are enormous,” Goble said. “It would take another couple years of snowpack well above average to really reset those reservoirs.” Climate scientists widely agree that extreme weather — droughts, floods, exceptionally heavy snow, heat waves — will become more common as the planet warms. The record-high global average concentrations of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping “greenhouse” gases in the atmosphere — from humans burning fossil fuels — are expected to bring steadily increasing global average temperatures for at least two more decades.
Sharper spring swings from cold to heat may alter mountain water runoff patterns, said Jennifer Gimbel, senior scholar at CSU’s Colorado Water Center, a former federal government water policy official and director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
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