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

States like Utah and Colorado have had abysmal snow totals this winter. It’s not a good sign for a region struggling to maintain its water.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ira Flatow?

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• 0:20Flora 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 Kondo, reporter at KUER Public Radio, based in St. George, Utah. Hey, David.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Hi, Flora.

• 0:52Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, would you agree with my assessment that people are freaked out?

• 0:55Speaker 02

  I think that is a fair and accurate assessment for Utah, yeah. I mean, 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 you know on the sidewalk. It's a big deal. I mean, Utah, as you may have heard, is 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 kind of intermittent snow through the winter is just this kind of weird,

• 1:39Speaker 02

  constant reminder of the situation that we're in.

• 1:43Flora Lichtman?

  And it goes way beyond winter sports, right? What's the concern here?

• 1:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, the big concern, and I think a lot of Utahns are aware of this, is our water supply. I mean, it's really, 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. I mean, 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.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  I mean, 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.

• 2:40Flora Lichtman?

  Wow. So the stakes are high because it's not just your water supply, right?

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, this is part of the upper Colorado River basin here in Utah. And so, yeah, when Colorado and Utah and these kind of 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 way that, 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.

• 3:23Flora Lichtman?

  Does it feel existential?

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Oh, I think it's very up in your face. I mean, and that's, you know, with the Colorado River negotiations going on right now, it's very, like you said, the stakes are very high. It is hard to look away from how important this is. And yeah, I mean, 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, you know, science tells us, you know, years like this may come around more often as we go into the future, what does that mean for a place like Utah where, you know, people love to live, but it's just a very dry state?

• 4:02Flora Lichtman?

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

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you, Flora.

• 4:09Flora 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.

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• 6:09Flora Lichtman?

  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.

• 6:38Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me.

• 6:39Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, so how historic is this year's low snowpack?

• 6:45Speaker 05

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

• 7:07Flora Lichtman?

  Is this just about precipitation or temperature too?

• 7:11Speaker 05

  No, there's a huge temperature signal in this. And of course it's anthropogenic. It's human cause. So what we've seen out west since October is about temperatures, five Fahrenheit warmer than normal, which is a lot. It may not sound like a lot, but it is. Here in Colorado, it's been in December, it was 10 Fahrenheit warmer than normal. And this is part of this ongoing trend of the American West, especially the Colorado River where it's a lot warmer and that warmth has all kinds of implications for the future.

• 7:43Flora Lichtman?

  Wow. I mean, we've been using the term snow drought. Is drought the right word to describe what's happening?

• 7:49Speaker 05

  You know, it's really not. So drought is something that's temporary, right? 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. I mean, 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.

• 8:31Flora Lichtman?

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

• 8:42Speaker 05

  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. You know, it's up almost three Fahrenheit in the, in the Colorado River Basin since, 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's down about seven percent per year. None of it is actually in, in the winter, the December, January, February

• 9:24Speaker 05

  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.

• 9:39Flora Lichtman?

  Hmm. You know, 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?

• 9:54Speaker 05

  So there's a whole bunch of them and they're all pretty depressing. So, so one thing we're going to see is a whole bunch of-

• 10:02Flora Lichtman?

  Buckle up, listeners.

• 10:03Speaker 05

  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 that this system. And that's part of these ongoing negotiations about how we're going to share the required cutbacks in Colorado River use.

• 10:48Flora Lichtman?

  Does this year make those negotiations more urgent?

• 10:52Speaker 05

  It sure does. In the year 2000, the nation's two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell, Lake Mead, were completely chock full and they're now 70% empty.

• 11:04Speaker 05

  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, any progress on these negotiations.

• 11:22Flora Lichtman?

  So for these negotiations over the Colorado River, I mean, how much water use reduction are we talking about?

• 11:30Speaker 05

  Okay, so since the year 2000, the nation's two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Meade, 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, of 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

• 12:13Speaker 05

  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, you know, all entities that use Colorado River water.

• 12:26Flora Lichtman?

  I guess I'm wondering, like, that seems beyond, you know, whether someone takes a long shower. We must be talking about agriculture at this point.

• 12:34Speaker 05

  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.

• 13:11Flora Lichtman?

  Like what? What's very fundamental changes like it doesn't exist to the same degree or what are those changes?

• 13:19Speaker 05

  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 agricultural in the in the in the center part of the state, but even that probably doesn't solve the solution. And 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, are going to have to change alternative crops, or maybe grow crops only sometimes 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

• 14:04Speaker 05

  grown. So, you know, 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.

• 14:18Flora Lichtman?

  I mean, that's so devastating, obviously, to farmers who work in these areas. Do people dispute this? I mean, are there is there controversy over whether that is the direction that we will ultimately need to go?

• 14:31Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Well, this is highly contentious, and it's why the seven states have not been able to agree on anything that that looks like a solution. And in the case of Arizona, I mean, the cuts may be so big that ultimately some long existing agriculture along the Colorado River that has senior rights may have to give way 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. I mean, 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.

• 15:15Flora Lichtman?

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

• 15:24Speaker 05

  Maybe, but most people actually get this wrong. Water's 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 re-diverted by some downstream water user.

• 16:05Speaker 05

  And oftentimes, water efficiency measures, believe it or not, actually lead to increases in water use, not reductions, paradoxically.

• 16:15Flora Lichtman?

  Oh, that's fascinating. I mean, I think we also often hear that the water crisis is related to, you know, people moving to cities out west. Is that true?

• 16:24Speaker 05

  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 showerheads 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.

• 17:08Flora Lichtman?

  I mean, if there's no consensus on these Colorado River negotiations, what happens? What happens for the people living and relying on this water?

• 17:18Speaker 05

  So what you're gonna see, I believe, is the federal government's gonna impose a solution. And nobody's gonna like 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, you know, 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. It involves, you know, again, 40 million people, seven different states, 30 Indian

• 18:02Speaker 05

  tribes, two nations, Mexico's 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.

• 18:20Flora Lichtman?

  Hmm. You know, with climate change, there's always been this, this often repeated line, you know, 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?

• 18:36Speaker 05

  In the case of the Colorado River, we're gonna get to adapt. I mean, that's very clearly the case. But to give up on, you know, reducing our greenhouse gas emissions is completely silly and counterproductive and stupid, frankly. So, you know, 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 gonna 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.

• 19:17Flora Lichtman?

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

• 19:24Speaker 05

  My pleasure.

• 19:25Flora Lichtman?

  This episode was produced by Kathleen Davis. And if you know 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, 8774-Sci-Fry. Thanks for listening. I'm Flora Lichtman.