Wet La Niña winter likely to bring more water into Lake Powell
One of the Colorado River’s two major reservoirs is expected to collect better than average runoff this year, thanks to an unusually wet La Niña pattern that dropped a deluge of snow up and down the basin. Lake Powell, the nation’s second largest reservoir that sits on the border of Utah and Arizona, is expected to receive 117 percent of its average inflows as the heavy snowpack melts in the western Rockies during the all-important April through July time frame, said Cody Mosier, a hydrologist with the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. Snowfall in recent months has brought snowpack levels across much of the Upper Colorado River Basin to roughly 139 percent of the region’s 30-year-average … Part of the rosier outlook for the river is an improvement in soil moisture conditions, Mosier said. Lower soil moisture conditions across the basin have made runoff far less efficient over the last two years.