Why isn't Colorado's snowpack ending up in the Colorado River?
phys.org
phys.org
It sounds like you know this already, but the core issue here is that the 1922 agreement which divided the river's flow to various stakeholders overestimated the amount of water in the river even before the impacts of our modern warmer, drier climate.
We're left with the consequences of this overestimate mostly in the form of gridlocked renegotiation conversations as the agreement is reworked for the modern resource scenario.
Probably the biggest tl;dr here is: it's not going to be 60 million people fighting over water. It's going to be far fewer, and they're all alfalfa farmers.
Nit: on average, the world will get wetter as it warms. Warmer air carries more water, so the volume of precipitation each year is likely to increase averaged over the planet.
The issue for many of these areas is that that increased precipitation is not going to be evenly distributed. The trend has been wetter areas getting wetter, drier areas getting drier, and increased warmth causing increased evaporation and less snowpack persistence into summer.
Colorado (the state) is building many new reservoirs to impound water outside of the Colorado River Compact's purview. They're done hoping that California and Arizona will act responsibly, and are now going to be selfish.
Snow Totals - taken from https://psl.noaa.gov/boulder/bouldersnow.html
1900's 72.34 avg
1910's 66.19 avg
1920's 63.83 avg
1930's 54.65 avg
1940's 87.85 avg
1950's 84.45 avg
1960's 77.22 avg
1970's 81.2 avg
1980's 65.06 avg
1990's 98.32 avg
2000's 84.25 avg
2010's 94.79 avg
2020's 97.52 avg over 4 years not 10
rain totals taken from - https://psl.noaa.gov/boulder/Boulder.mm.precip.html
1900's 19.21 avg
1910's 18.12 avg
1920's 18.61 avg
1930's 16.46 avg
1940's 21.72 avg
1950's 18.49 avg
1960's 17.8 avg
1970's 18.35 avg
1980's 19.71 avg
1990's 22.68 avg
2000's 19.04 avg
2010's 22.25 avg
2020's 19.84 avg over 4 years not 10
Furthermore, as the OP's article alludes to, snow _amount_ is only one component that contributes to water availability, particularly its timing. Larger amounts of snow that melt very fast in the spring create a novel regime that our current systems aren't well-suited to support, for example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XusyNT_k-1c
The reason for the water shortages is not more people it’s a complete and utter mismanagement of the watershed
One thing to keep in mind is that most estimates place human consumption of water at below 20% - a ton of the water of the basin goes to agriculture. To be clear, I think this makes sense - with added water regions in the basin can be some of the most productive ag regions in the country.
The big problem is policy has not adapted to scarcity. There are real tradeoffs when we have 30% less water than forecast and it's not clear who should suffer them.
I think there is often a misconception that this area is somehow "too hot" to live in. Since the advent of air conditioning, we have moved past this. Generally speaking similarly sized homes in Boston will consume more energy for HVAC than Phoenix will simply because heating homes in cold winters is often more energy intensive than cooling in the summer.
Water usage in the colorado basin: https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/article/meat-of-the-matter-col...
This is true, and I definitely agree that the majority of the work to match consumption with water availability lies in the hands of agriculture.
With that said, it's important to recognize that the CO basin states (AZ, WY, UT) have some of the highest per-capita domestic water use figures in the nation - far above the national average.
There are more wealthy neighborhoods where it's closer to 1 in 4, but again wouldn't call that ubiquitous at all.
That said, I think that some of the farming use is excessive and should lean into regenerative agriculture over the more wasteful use of chemical fertilizers and desertification over time only taking away and eroding soil.
In contrast, here's a random middle class neighborhood in central Phoenix[0], the fifth most populous city in the US of A. You'll notice some of the streets have a pool in every single backyard. When you zoom in on the higher income neighborhoods, like in Scottsdale and PV, it's rare to see a backyard that doesn't have a pool.
[0] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Phoenix,+AZ/@33.5352177,-1...
> Settlements in the region depend on groundwater. In the 1960s the City of Albuquerque began to extract large quantities of potable groundwater from wells drilled in the southeast and northeast heights. It was thought that this water came from a huge aquifer that would take centuries to exhaust. In the late 1980s there were declines in the water levels near Coronado Center causing concern that the water resource was not properly understood
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albuquerque_Basin
Whoopsie!
The RG AFAIK is also supplied by primary Colorado mountain sources, but also from various other smaller mountain and rainfall feeds. I get that the Colorado River is the big kahuna. Id would love to see the RG at least casually discussed in these bigger sw water discussions.
Logical next step: remove the vegetation for more human population!
It is renewable, isn't it ? /s
I guess somewhere in Africa should per perfect? I doubt the humans who split off and went north have had their instincts change enough to not prefer that sort of climate, and that explains the draw to sun rich areas. Not to mention those who left that region much more recently.
It’s interesting that I haven’t seen any groups with a Darwinian Zionism, so to speak. An ancestral claim to the region where humans evolved.
More importantly, humans need water.
But what is a more typical "dream" desire by the average human? To retire in a northern forest, or to retire on a tropical island? Where do people typically vacation, when the surroundings and how they feel are the primary focus? Do the very wealthy, who can do whatever they like, usually spend more time in the woods or in the tropics? Did Ellison and Zuckerberg buy large swaths of temperate forest? Etc.
Ellison and Zuckerberg have very different values than I have.
Getting out of the Southwest and coming to the Midwest (school) and staying for a while before spending 18 years in Canada was a joy.
I found the people to be less religious, less racist, surprisingly in to locally sourced food and nature conservation.
I'm certainly not poor, but most wealthy people I know are, well, not really someone I would want to spend a lot of time with or emulate.
You can’t delete these instincts, you can only bury them.
It might, instead, be a cultural influence?
I feel like I am being pedantic, though. Apologies for that.
Large-scale migration into the arid parts of North America and elsewhere was first facilitated by the development of the technology to use deep aquifers.
Prehistoric spread was driven by other factors that were more important than climate preference. But that doesn't eliminate climate preference, and all else equal humans will act on that preference.
When it comes to agriculture in the desert, which is still the major reason why the snowpack shortfall is a matter of concern, the motivation seems more economic: crops grow very well in sunny climates, so long as you can give them adequate water - and we could, for a while, but probably not sustainably.
Also, as far as climate, day length pattern, vegetation, etc., I don't think moving back to, say, the Midwest (particularly the lower part) would be screwing most people. Alaska? Sure. Kansas City? Day lengths are pretty normal there.
I too like nice weather, but it's getting to the point that the summers over large parts of the US are as harsh as the midwestern winters everyone wants to avoid.
I mean they were wrong, it obviously does sustain life. You're just grumpy about what it looks like.
As for that native gentleman, I'm not sure what the situation is down south, but the prairies of Canada and the Northern US have been known to have dry spells. The 1930's were particularly bad, but apparently early explorers returned conflicting reports about the habitability of the prairies simply because of the variability in precipitation across the years. Of course, aboriginals would have knowledge of that since they inhabited those lands for time immemorial. I have even seen suggestions that those who lived in the regions were nomadic since they had to follow the food (which, of course, had to follow its own food). This is in sharp contrast to those who inhabited other parts of the Americas, who were settled.
It can't sustain 40 million people who all want a pool, a grass lawn, freshly-grown fruits/nuts/vegetables, air conditioning, large-scale manufacturing, golf courses, etc.
I actually couldn't care less whether the Colorado makes it to the ocean. I have two major rivers in my city. There's plenty of water without having to fine people for using water on the opposite of their odd-even day. The heat during the summer is uncomfortable but it's usually not an imminent threat to human life after an hour of unhydrated exertion.
The limit of carrying capacity is the limit of sustainability. If the system is coming closer to the carrying capacity, the current state, having 40 million people with lawns, is sustainable!
If your argument is that having 200 million people with lawns is unsustainable, say that! But that's not what you said.
There are already towns in California experiencing spells of not having any potable water [0]. We've pumped so much water out of parts of California that some land has dropped almost 30 feet [1]. Wildfire season in the southwest, including California, is now longer and more severe than it once was [2]. Arizona has passed resolutions imploring Congress to investigate diverting water from the Mississippi River out west [3] which is almost guaranteed to cause serious political confrontations.
So, no, the current state of things and the projected growth isn't sustainable. When you're honestly considering the idea of building a continent-wide aqueduct system to keep golf courses in Phoenix playable, you're better off packing up and heading back to the Midwest and Northeast to repopulate towns that have infrastructure we already bought and paid for decades ago.
[0] https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2021/06/california-... [1] http://www.purewatergazette.net/blog/gazettes-famous-water-p... [2] https://specialreports.news.uci.edu/climate-change/the-probl... [3] https://apnews.com/article/science-arizona-state-government-...
These don't seem like observations that require laboratories and massive studies to me.
While perhaps it might be intuitive to you that transpiration impacts streamflow (which, if it is, you should consider a career in water resource management!), it's not sufficient to stop there when trying to model the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ditch
Though it gets a lot more involved,