A month later, the projections have only gotten worse.
The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center reported on June 1 that the amount of water expected to flow into Lake Powell between April and July this year will be 45% of average. “Average,” in forecasting, refers to the average runoff between 1991 and 2020.
The June forecast follows a consistent decline since the start of winter.
Hydrologists said in December that Lake Powell’s runoff would be 92% of average. In January, the forecast dropped to 81%, then to 67% in February. The prediction pushed up to 70% in March, but fell to 55% in May, before dropping to 45% in June.
Jack Schmidt, a watershed sciences professor at Utah State University and director of the Center for Colorado River Studies, and John Fleck, a water professor at the University of New Mexico, released a study about the state of the Colorado River’s largest reservoirs on June 1.
They wrote that instead of increasing with spring runoff flows, the amount of water in Lake Powell and Lake Mead has decreased through the end of May.
“Never in the past 15 years has the decline in total storage of Powell and Mead extended so late into spring,” the study reads.
That decline is the result of chronic overuse, Schmidt and Fleck write, which is “outpacing the melting snowpack’s ability to replenish the two reservoirs.”
Lake Powell and Lake Mead are each about 32% full as of June 4. Though runoff will continue spilling into the reservoirs through the summer, the current low levels are reminiscent of the ones that caused so much alarm in 2021, the study says.
Read more at sltrib.com.
This article is published through the Utah News Collaborative, a partnership of news organizations in Utah that aims to inform readers across the state