The Western US is already running out of water — and summer is still months away

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Officials were already sounding the alarm bells in early March across the Western United States after a winter with historically low snowpacks, which supplies water for communities as it slowly melts throughout the spring and summer. 

Then came the heat wave. 

As I reported last week, a high-pressure system brought early-season heat to the region, breaking temperature records in many states with help from climate change. Much of the little snow left in parts of the region melted, sparking fears for water supplies because it may evaporate or run off too early in the season, experts say.  

Compounding the problem, more than half of the Western US is now experiencing drought conditions, according to the federal drought monitoring system.

So how is the West trying to prevent a looming water crisis spurred by this triple weather whammy? Some areas are cracking down on community water usage earlier than they’ve ever had to, disrupting many parts of daily life—from gardening habits to dining out. And bigger concerns loom as states squabble over shared resources from the Colorado River, a critical and increasingly strapped watershed in the region. 

Many places around the world face similar dilemmas as climate change drives an “intensifying global pattern of more widespread and severe drought,” a new study finds. 

Heat and drought fallout 

The Denver Board of Water Commissioners announced last week a series of water limits with a goal to cut area usage by 20 percent. Restaurant owners have been asked to only serve water if a diner requests it. Customers of Denver Water — a public water utility in the city — must limit lawn watering to no more than two days per week, and there are more cuts on the horizon, depending on forecasts. 

“The situation is quite serious,” Todd Hartman, a spokesperson for the utility, told NBC News. He added that although Denver Water’s reservoirs are roughly 80 percent full, the city can’t rely on snowpack like it typically does to refill them as levels drop. “We’re in such a dire situation that we could be coming back to the public in two or three months and saying you’re limited to one day a week.”

In the northern Colorado city of Erie, residents and businesses were told earlier in March to halt all irrigation until early April, with a target to reduce usage by more than 45 percent. Officials threatened to shut off the tap altogether for violators.  

Recreation has also been hard: More than half of the 120 ski resorts in the US West either closed, will close early, or never opened this year, according to a Reuters analysis. In Wyoming, one of the locations that did stay open experienced a slushy surprise last week as snow melted beneath skiers on the slopes. 

“It was a swimming pool. We should have been checking for floaties and not lift passes, it was pretty warm,” Dalan Adams, general manager of White Pine ski resort, told Wyoming Public Media. 

Many areas in the region are also contending with fire restrictions as hot, dry conditions increase the risk of blazes. Experts say spring rains could help mitigate fire risk, but climatologist John Abatzoglou told CBC that everything is “lining up for a potentially nasty fire season across the west.”

My colleague Michael Kodas, who is based in Boulder, Colorado, and has long reported on wildfires and climate change, has seen these threats firsthand in past parched years. I asked him how water restrictions, drought, and lower snowpack could influence wildfire behavior in the coming months. Here’s his inside scoop:

Most wildfires this time of year are fueled by grasses, which firefighters call “one-hour fuels” because they can dry to the point of burning in 60 minutes, so they don’t need a winter-long drought to get them ready to carry flames. As one fire behavior analyst pointed out to me from his truck outside of Denver last week, most grasses this time of year are dead, with or without a drought, and they can’t get much drier, or more flammable, than that.

But if grasses that would normally still be covered by snow are exposed to sun, wind and dry air earlier in the season, they’ll be able to burn that much earlier in the season too. And in some cases where no substantial snow has fallen on tall grasses, the stalks haven’t been matted down by the weight of snow but are instead still standing upright like match sticks and that much easier to ignite. And out on the plains, where vast, fast grassfires during droughts threaten livestock and croplands, highly flammable invasive species like cheatgrass and red cedar are making drought-primed fires much more volatile.

The bigger problem is that the snow drought has likely left many heavier, woodier fuels like trees drier than they would normally be in the spring, so they’re ready to burn much earlier in the year. Soils desiccated by drought are unlikely to recover, even with soaking spring rains, so the vegetation growing on them may not have enough moisture available to green up and resist flames.

And fire weather conditions are making wildland blazes more likely to burn big in much of the West, regardless of the fuel conditions. Warm temperatures through much of the winter and early spring, including the recent heat wave, along with low relative humidity and unusually strong and frequent wind storms, have led to an unusual number of “red flag” fire weather days right through the winter in much of the Rocky Mountains. Those fire weather conditions led utilities to cut power where I live in the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies several times since December to prevent power lines from starting wildfires.

High-stakes water negotiations

Though early winter storms helped maintain relatively average precipitation levels in much of the West, rain does not help support long-term water security for the region as much as snow. 

“A gallon of winter rain that immediately runs off downstream is not nearly as helpful come July as a gallon of snowpack that melts in April or May,” Casey Olson, a climate scientist with the Utah Climate Center, told ABC News. “They are not equivalent gallons of precipitation in terms of our ability to use them when we need them the most.”

As much as 75 percent of water supplies during certain years come from melting snow in some states, including Colorado and Utah. A growing body of research finds that climate change is triggering more frequent snow droughts.

Traditional droughts are also worsening due to global warming: A study published this week found that the period from 2021 through 2023 has seen some of the most widespread and severe drought conditions in over a century across the globe. 

These events contribute to shrinking the Colorado River, which around 40 million people depend on. Representatives from the seven Western states in the basin have met several times over the past two years to determine how to divvy up the dwindling resources, but intense debates over who gets what have stalled the process despite the federal government stepping in, as my Inside Climate News colleagues Jake Bolster and Wyatt Myskow reported in February.

In January, the US Bureau of Reclamation released a draft environmental impact statement that outlined proposed cuts to Colorado River water usage starting in 2027. 

The agency gave states until October before it will impose more aggressive cuts. The outcome of these negotiations could have profound implications for water users (so…everyone in the Southwest), but are especially impactful for the agriculture and energy industries. The Bureau of Reclamation recently estimated that water managers in the basin must conserve an additional 1.7 million acre-feet of water to keep Lake Powell’s levels from falling so low they can’t spin the hydropower turbines at Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona. 

Meanwhile, farmers in Yuma, Arizona — who supply much of the country’s winter vegetables — are concerned that they won’t get enough water allocations to support their crops, the news station ABC15 reports. Some farmers in Colorado are already adjusting their operations to grow more drought-tolerant crops. 

But industries don’t know what to expect as representatives remain at a stalemate on negotiations — and several states, including Nevada and California, have pledged to sue if they don’t get their way. 

No matter how it plays out, experts say the Western US must learn to adapt to more parched conditions in the face of climate change. 

“The record-low snowpack may be a harbinger of what a warmer future will look like in the region,” Alejandro N. Flores, a geoscientist at Boise State University, wrote in The Conversation. “This year’s snow drought presents a timely, albeit high-stakes, stress test for the West. Everyone will be watching.”