From the Rockies to the Cascades to the Sierra Nevada, mountainsides across the West are sparsely covered by the snow that usually blankets the high country well into the summer.
That snowpack is like a savings account that the West draws on when the hot, dry months arrive. It moistens the landscape as it melts, lessening the risk of severe wildfire. The runoff feeds into river basins, and the swelling waterways provide power to hydroelectric dams, irrigation to farmers and drinking water to cities.
This article was first published by Stateline. It is republished here with permission.
This year, Western states are heading into the summer with a desperately low balance — threatening wildfires, drinking water, crops, electricity and more.
“This has been an extremely poor year,” said Sharon Megdal, director of the Water Resources Research Center, a research unit at the University of Arizona. “This has gotten a lot of people concerned and alarmed.”
While a late-season storm brought heavy snow to parts of the Rockies this month, the region remains in a deep snowpack deficit.
As warmer weather arrives, states are preparing for a dangerous wildfire season across the drought-stricken West. Farmers and cities are bracing for potential cutbacks in their water allocations from rivers that have less to give. Fisheries managers are watching for low river flows that could threaten vital salmon runs. And worsening conditions could threaten the supply of hydropower that provides cheap, clean electricity to many Western states.
A hot, dry winter
Across nearly the entire West, states spent the winter waiting for snow that rarely arrived. Ski resorts lost millions of visitors as they struggled to stay open. Then in March, a record-breaking heat wave settled across the region, shrinking the already paltry snowpack.
“It’s unheard of,” Megdal said. “Things were already looking bad in January, but if you follow the projections, they had to keep revising the numbers downward because the snow just never came and we had this hugely hot period in March.”
The federal National Water and Climate Center produces a real-time map showing the snow water equivalent in river basins across the country — a measurement of how much moisture is being held in those mountaintop savings accounts.
The majority of the West is bright red, indicating that snowpack is at less than 50% of the median level for this time of year. Yellow and orange cover most of the remaining areas, showing regions that are still well below the median.
The most recent U.S. Drought Monitor map shows most of the country in abnormally dry or drought conditions, aside from the Great Lakes region and some other parts of the Midwest.
Wildfire
For many Western states, the most imminent threat from the dry winter is the prospect of a dangerous wildfire season.
Already, wildfires in Nebraska have burned hundreds of thousands of acres, shattering records and setting the stage for a record wildfire year.
The wildland fire outlook maps produced by the National Interagency Fire Center show above-normal fire risk spreading across much of the West by June and July.
“There’s a lot of red on the map,” said Matthew Dehr, wildland fire meteorologist with the Washington state Department of Natural Resources.
Dave Upthegrove, Washington’s public lands commissioner, said his agency is preparing for fire season as normal but with a heightened awareness that this summer could be demanding. He’s focused on educating residents about the risks, noting that 90% of wildfires in Washington are caused by humans.
“What we’re likely to see are wildfires moving more quickly through forests,” he said. “When we do have a large fire event, it’s likely to move faster, be more significant.”
He also noted that this year is Washington’s fourth consecutive year of drought conditions, making trees more susceptible to diseases and pests and compounding wildfire risk.
Dehr said spring rains could provide a bit of a buffer before the heat of July and August, but a recent stretch of sunny weeks has yet to provide relief.
Upthegrove noted that the challenging conditions across much of the West could make it more difficult for states to send wildfire crews to each other’s aid, if many states are battling big blazes simultaneously.
“As the climate crisis pushes a forest health crisis pushes a wildfire crisis, it’s going to stress the whole system, not just in our state,” he said.
Low water supplies
Many Western states also rely on snowpack to feed rivers that provide irrigation for farming and the water supply for cities. In particular, the Colorado River provides water for tens of millions of people across seven states, a region that has grown even as the river’s supply has dwindled in recent decades. Reservoirs that were full at the turn of the century are now nearing critically low levels.
“There hasn’t been enough flow in the river to meet all these expected demands, even in the good years,” said Megdal, the water researcher. “We’ve used up our savings and storage, so now what do we do?”
Water allocations for states, tribes and farmers in the region are governed by a complicated and fiercely contested system known as the Colorado River Compact. In recent years, cutbacks due to the low supply reduced the water allocation for central Arizona, including all of the water for agricultural users.
Now, states are fighting over even less water and struggling to negotiate who should bear the cost. Last week, Arizona, California and Nevada submitted a proposal to federal officials that would impose further cutbacks over the next two years in order to buy time for a longer-term deal.
“It’s turning out to be very hard to get the states to agree on how to slice up a much smaller pie,” Megdal said. “There are scenarios that are not zero probability that are catastrophic to the region.”
If the states are unable to reach an agreement, allocation for the river’s diminished water will be determined by federal regulators under the “law of the river.” Cutbacks imposed by the feds could fall heavily on central Arizona, Megdal said, cutting the supply for Phoenix, Tucson and some tribal nations.
Such uncertainty in the Colorado River basin and elsewhere “leaves farmers making planting decisions now without knowing whether sufficient water will be available to carry crops through harvest,” the American Farm Bureau Federation wrote in an April report.
The lack of water could force farmers to remove trees or vineyards, the Farm Bureau noted, or reduce cattle herds if the parched landscape does not supply enough forage.
Meanwhile, rivers running at a slow trickle could reduce the hydroelectric power produced by dams across the West. Across 13 Western states, hydropower accounts for nearly a quarter of electrical generation.
The Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona, which forms Lake Powell, produces about 5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year, enough to power nearly half a million homes. But the lake level may soon fall below a threshold from which the dam can no longer generate power.
“Hydropower is so incredibly important because it has been the lowest-cost power for many in the West,” Megdal said. “There are big implications for the energy grid and the cost of electricity.”
Stateline reporter Alex Brown can be reached at abrown@stateline.org.