Wet winter won’t fix Colorado River woes
Snowpack has been running well above average this winter across the Colorado River watershed. It’s a rare bright spot after 23 years of grinding megadrought brought the driest conditions in 1,200 years to the basin that supplies 40 million people in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and Mexico. Should the generous rains and mountain snows continue into spring, they would head off a deeper water crisis, including perhaps an unprecedented loss of hydropower generation from severely depleted Lake Powell and Lake Mead. As of August 2022, chances that such a loss of generation, known as a “minimum power pool,” could happen by late 2023 had risen to an alarming 30%, according to calculations released by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Autumn and early winter moisture has now pushed those odds back below 10% as of the January update from the bureau.
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