6 ms·

Why isn't Colorado's snowpack ending up in the Colorado River?

90 points by wglb 2y ago

bacon_waffle 2y ago
Because it's in the Arkansas River drainage?
- justinator 2y ago
  Hmm, no. The water that's diverted from the Colorado via the Grand Ditch goes into the Cache la Poudre River, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ditch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ditch Though it gets a lot more involved, https://issuu.com/cfwe/docs/cfwe_cgtb_web https://issuu.com/cfwe/docs/cfwe_cgtb_web
  - bacon_waffle 2y ago
    It was a stupid riff on the title. But, the Arkansas River does start in Colorado, and so some amount of Colorado's snowpack does wind up in Arkansas' river.
    - julienchastang 2y ago
      The Colorado snow pack ends up in the Rio Grande, and Platte as well.
tadeegan 2y ago
> With less rain, the plants in the area rely more on the snowmelt for water, leaving less water to make its way into the nearby streams. Decreased rain also means sunny skies, which encourages plant growth and water evaporation from the soil. Logical next step: remove the vegetation for more human population!
- hulitu 2y ago
  > Logical next step: remove the vegetation for more human population! It is renewable, isn't it ? /s
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  "What if we took the people and businesses from the places with large rivers and continental climates, and put them in a sun-blasted hellscape that these native gentlemen keep telling us cannot sustain life?" - American policy from 1840 to now
  - pfannkuchen 2y ago
    I think the global north doesn’t really line up with human instinct in a lot of ways. Climate, day length pattern, vegetation. I guess somewhere in Africa should per perfect? I doubt the humans who split off and went north have had their instincts change enough to not prefer that sort of climate, and that explains the draw to sun rich areas. Not to mention those who left that region much more recently. It’s interesting that I haven’t seen any groups with a Darwinian Zionism, so to speak. An ancestral claim to the region where humans evolved.
    - apercu 2y ago
      I don't know, I love the northern flora, too, Rattlesnake master, moline, dogwood, black-eyed susan, blazing star, echinacea (purple coneflower) and so many more. More importantly, humans need water.
      - pfannkuchen 2y ago
        I think emotional attachment does form to what is familiar within our lifetimes. But what is a more typical "dream" desire by the average human? To retire in a northern forest, or to retire on a tropical island? Where do people typically vacation, when the surroundings and how they feel are the primary focus? Do the very wealthy, who can do whatever they like, usually spend more time in the woods or in the tropics? Did Ellison and Zuckerberg buy large swaths of temperate forest? Etc.
        apercu 2y ago
        Maybe. I grew up in the Southwest. Ellison and Zuckerberg have very different values than I have. Getting out of the Southwest and coming to the Midwest (school) and staying for a while before spending 18 years in Canada was a joy. I found the people to be less religious, less racist, surprisingly in to locally sourced food and nature conservation. I'm certainly not poor, but most wealthy people I know are, well, not really someone I would want to spend a lot of time with or emulate.
- tracker1 2y ago
  Vegetation doesn't just draw on water... it also protects the soil from excess evaporation of water when foliage dies and provides cover.
fiftyfifty 2y ago
One of these years the Colorado mountains are going to get a fraction of the snow they normally get and it's going to be a disaster for the entire southwest US. It almost happened in the winter of 2020-21, the snowpack statewide was just 30-40% of average at the end of winter. A heavy, wet, late spring storm dropped a ton of snow in the Colorado mountains in April of 2021 and saved the day, but man if that storm hadn't happened...imagine the 60 odd million people from Colorado to Mexico fighting over just a third of the normal amount of water they have to work with?
- tony_cannistra 2y ago
  Indeed. Worse, it's likely that "one of these years" will turn into "most of these years" before long. It sounds like you know this already, but the core issue here is that the 1922 agreement which divided the river's flow to various stakeholders overestimated the amount of water in the river even before the impacts of our modern warmer, drier climate. We're left with the consequences of this overestimate mostly in the form of gridlocked renegotiation conversations as the agreement is reworked for the modern resource scenario. Probably the biggest tl;dr here is: it's not going to be 60 million people fighting over water. It's going to be far fewer, and they're all alfalfa farmers.
  - margalabargala 2y ago
    > the impacts of our modern warmer, drier climate. Nit: on average, the world will get wetter as it warms. Warmer air carries more water, so the volume of precipitation each year is likely to increase averaged over the planet. The issue for many of these areas is that that increased precipitation is not going to be evenly distributed. The trend has been wetter areas getting wetter, drier areas getting drier, and increased warmth causing increased evaporation and less snowpack persistence into summer.
    - tony_cannistra 2y ago
      yes, certainly. The biggest impact with respect to precipitation is likely a shift in the precipitation regimes (liquid/frozen; frequency/intensity of storms, etc).
kamikazeturtles 2y ago
I'm surprised they had less rain. Here in Minnesota, it's been constant heavy rain. My pond floods almost every week. I have to pump it out into a nearby lake and that's a pain.
smeej 2y ago
Am I the only one surprised this took as much detailed study as it did? Nobody noticed a lot more greenery about in the basins they're talking about? Or nobody noticed the fact that it hadn't been raining in those places in the spring and wondered why the plants there were still fine? These don't seem like observations that require laboratories and massive studies to me.
- mannykannot 2y ago
  Its one thing to form a hypothesis, and another to demonstrate that it is correct, especially when there are alternatives (in this case, sublimation was one.) Where climate and ecology are involved, it takes some time to gather robust data, and there is no suggestion that this was a massive study over that period.
- tony_cannistra 2y ago
  In the context of managing water resources in an increasingly variable future, it's very important to quantify the relative impact of these kinds of factors on streamflow. While perhaps it might be intuitive to you that transpiration impacts streamflow (which, if it is, you should consider a career in water resource management!), it's not sufficient to stop there when trying to model the future.
tallowen 2y ago
As someone who has lived in the southwest, it can't be understated how important the issue of water is. One thing to keep in mind is that most estimates place human consumption of water at below 20% - a ton of the water of the basin goes to agriculture. To be clear, I think this makes sense - with added water regions in the basin can be some of the most productive ag regions in the country. The big problem is policy has not adapted to scarcity. There are real tradeoffs when we have 30% less water than forecast and it's not clear who should suffer them. I think there is often a misconception that this area is somehow "too hot" to live in. Since the advent of air conditioning, we have moved past this. Generally speaking similarly sized homes in Boston will consume more energy for HVAC than Phoenix will simply because heating homes in cold winters is often more energy intensive than cooling in the summer. Water usage in the colorado basin: https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/article/meat-of-the-matter-colorado-river-over-consumed/ https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/article/meat-of-the-matter-col...
- gamepsys 2y ago
  Seems pretty clear to me that agriculture should wax and wane it's consumption and humans should have access to a consistent generous ration.
  - nicholasjarnold 2y ago
    Yes, and we should be investing heavily into technologies and techniques that maximize the efficiency of the water that is consumed by agriculture. The government should probably subsidize the expense of the conversion. We should also get rid of any "use it or lose next year's ration" rules that are in place which cause some farmers to literally just run water out of their pipes to ensure they're recorded as having "used their allocation" and therefore "still require that much next year".
    - AlotOfReading 2y ago
      Using a normal common law water rights system is literally prohibited by some state constitutions (e.g. AZ article 17). It would take a movement on the order of civil rights to fix water rights.
animal_spirits 2y ago
Anytime water and the southwest comes up I always recommend the documentary series Cadillac Desert, based on the book. It's on YouTube and tells the story of how the southwest became livable due to the damming of many major rivers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR2BSGQt2DU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR2BSGQt2DU
- hnburnsy 2y ago
  And air conditioning.
  - animal_spirits 2y ago
    That's not the focus of the documentary
igtztorrero 2y ago
Answer: The very bad math drying up the Colorado River https://youtu.be/AzpYHXgfbbI?si=Snwfv4ocXn018CF_ https://youtu.be/AzpYHXgfbbI?si=Snwfv4ocXn018CF_
cdaringe 2y ago
I used to live in Albuquerque, which sources water from a few places—a small mountain range to the east, aquifer, and the rio grande (aka the rio not-at-all-grande). > Settlements in the region depend on groundwater. In the 1960s the City of Albuquerque began to extract large quantities of potable groundwater from wells drilled in the southeast and northeast heights. It was thought that this water came from a huge aquifer that would take centuries to exhaust. In the late 1980s there were declines in the water levels near Coronado Center causing concern that the water resource was not properly understood [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albuquerque_Basin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albuquerque_Basin Whoopsie! The RG AFAIK is also supplied by primary Colorado mountain sources, but also from various other smaller mountain and rainfall feeds. I get that the Colorado River is the big kahuna. Id would love to see the RG at least casually discussed in these bigger sw water discussions.

90 points by wglb 2y ago

bacon_waffle 2y ago

Because it's in the Arkansas River drainage?

justinator 2y ago
Hmm, no. The water that's diverted from the Colorado via the Grand Ditch goes into the Cache la Poudre River, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ditch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ditch Though it gets a lot more involved, https://issuu.com/cfwe/docs/cfwe_cgtb_web https://issuu.com/cfwe/docs/cfwe_cgtb_web
- bacon_waffle 2y ago
  It was a stupid riff on the title. But, the Arkansas River does start in Colorado, and so some amount of Colorado's snowpack does wind up in Arkansas' river.
  - julienchastang 2y ago
    The Colorado snow pack ends up in the Rio Grande, and Platte as well.

tadeegan 2y ago

> With less rain, the plants in the area rely more on the snowmelt for water, leaving less water to make its way into the nearby streams. Decreased rain also means sunny skies, which encourages plant growth and water evaporation from the soil. Logical next step: remove the vegetation for more human population!

hulitu 2y ago
> Logical next step: remove the vegetation for more human population! It is renewable, isn't it ? /s
lenerdenator 2y ago
"What if we took the people and businesses from the places with large rivers and continental climates, and put them in a sun-blasted hellscape that these native gentlemen keep telling us cannot sustain life?" - American policy from 1840 to now
- pfannkuchen 2y ago
  I think the global north doesn’t really line up with human instinct in a lot of ways. Climate, day length pattern, vegetation. I guess somewhere in Africa should per perfect? I doubt the humans who split off and went north have had their instincts change enough to not prefer that sort of climate, and that explains the draw to sun rich areas. Not to mention those who left that region much more recently. It’s interesting that I haven’t seen any groups with a Darwinian Zionism, so to speak. An ancestral claim to the region where humans evolved.
  - apercu 2y ago
    I don't know, I love the northern flora, too, Rattlesnake master, moline, dogwood, black-eyed susan, blazing star, echinacea (purple coneflower) and so many more. More importantly, humans need water.
    - pfannkuchen 2y ago
      I think emotional attachment does form to what is familiar within our lifetimes. But what is a more typical "dream" desire by the average human? To retire in a northern forest, or to retire on a tropical island? Where do people typically vacation, when the surroundings and how they feel are the primary focus? Do the very wealthy, who can do whatever they like, usually spend more time in the woods or in the tropics? Did Ellison and Zuckerberg buy large swaths of temperate forest? Etc.
      - apercu 2y ago
        Maybe. I grew up in the Southwest. Ellison and Zuckerberg have very different values than I have. Getting out of the Southwest and coming to the Midwest (school) and staying for a while before spending 18 years in Canada was a joy. I found the people to be less religious, less racist, surprisingly in to locally sourced food and nature conservation. I'm certainly not poor, but most wealthy people I know are, well, not really someone I would want to spend a lot of time with or emulate.
tracker1 2y ago
Vegetation doesn't just draw on water... it also protects the soil from excess evaporation of water when foliage dies and provides cover.

fiftyfifty 2y ago

One of these years the Colorado mountains are going to get a fraction of the snow they normally get and it's going to be a disaster for the entire southwest US. It almost happened in the winter of 2020-21, the snowpack statewide was just 30-40% of average at the end of winter. A heavy, wet, late spring storm dropped a ton of snow in the Colorado mountains in April of 2021 and saved the day, but man if that storm hadn't happened...imagine the 60 odd million people from Colorado to Mexico fighting over just a third of the normal amount of water they have to work with?

tony_cannistra 2y ago
Indeed. Worse, it's likely that "one of these years" will turn into "most of these years" before long. It sounds like you know this already, but the core issue here is that the 1922 agreement which divided the river's flow to various stakeholders overestimated the amount of water in the river even before the impacts of our modern warmer, drier climate. We're left with the consequences of this overestimate mostly in the form of gridlocked renegotiation conversations as the agreement is reworked for the modern resource scenario. Probably the biggest tl;dr here is: it's not going to be 60 million people fighting over water. It's going to be far fewer, and they're all alfalfa farmers.
- margalabargala 2y ago
  > the impacts of our modern warmer, drier climate. Nit: on average, the world will get wetter as it warms. Warmer air carries more water, so the volume of precipitation each year is likely to increase averaged over the planet. The issue for many of these areas is that that increased precipitation is not going to be evenly distributed. The trend has been wetter areas getting wetter, drier areas getting drier, and increased warmth causing increased evaporation and less snowpack persistence into summer.
  - tony_cannistra 2y ago
    yes, certainly. The biggest impact with respect to precipitation is likely a shift in the precipitation regimes (liquid/frozen; frequency/intensity of storms, etc).

kamikazeturtles 2y ago

I'm surprised they had less rain. Here in Minnesota, it's been constant heavy rain. My pond floods almost every week. I have to pump it out into a nearby lake and that's a pain.

smeej 2y ago

Am I the only one surprised this took as much detailed study as it did? Nobody noticed a lot more greenery about in the basins they're talking about? Or nobody noticed the fact that it hadn't been raining in those places in the spring and wondered why the plants there were still fine? These don't seem like observations that require laboratories and massive studies to me.

mannykannot 2y ago
Its one thing to form a hypothesis, and another to demonstrate that it is correct, especially when there are alternatives (in this case, sublimation was one.) Where climate and ecology are involved, it takes some time to gather robust data, and there is no suggestion that this was a massive study over that period.
tony_cannistra 2y ago
In the context of managing water resources in an increasingly variable future, it's very important to quantify the relative impact of these kinds of factors on streamflow. While perhaps it might be intuitive to you that transpiration impacts streamflow (which, if it is, you should consider a career in water resource management!), it's not sufficient to stop there when trying to model the future.

tallowen 2y ago

As someone who has lived in the southwest, it can't be understated how important the issue of water is. One thing to keep in mind is that most estimates place human consumption of water at below 20% - a ton of the water of the basin goes to agriculture. To be clear, I think this makes sense - with added water regions in the basin can be some of the most productive ag regions in the country. The big problem is policy has not adapted to scarcity. There are real tradeoffs when we have 30% less water than forecast and it's not clear who should suffer them. I think there is often a misconception that this area is somehow "too hot" to live in. Since the advent of air conditioning, we have moved past this. Generally speaking similarly sized homes in Boston will consume more energy for HVAC than Phoenix will simply because heating homes in cold winters is often more energy intensive than cooling in the summer. Water usage in the colorado basin: https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/article/meat-of-the-matter-colorado-river-over-consumed/ https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/article/meat-of-the-matter-col...

gamepsys 2y ago
Seems pretty clear to me that agriculture should wax and wane it's consumption and humans should have access to a consistent generous ration.
- nicholasjarnold 2y ago
  Yes, and we should be investing heavily into technologies and techniques that maximize the efficiency of the water that is consumed by agriculture. The government should probably subsidize the expense of the conversion. We should also get rid of any "use it or lose next year's ration" rules that are in place which cause some farmers to literally just run water out of their pipes to ensure they're recorded as having "used their allocation" and therefore "still require that much next year".
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    Using a normal common law water rights system is literally prohibited by some state constitutions (e.g. AZ article 17). It would take a movement on the order of civil rights to fix water rights.

animal_spirits 2y ago

Anytime water and the southwest comes up I always recommend the documentary series Cadillac Desert, based on the book. It's on YouTube and tells the story of how the southwest became livable due to the damming of many major rivers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR2BSGQt2DU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR2BSGQt2DU

hnburnsy 2y ago
And air conditioning.
- animal_spirits 2y ago
  That's not the focus of the documentary

igtztorrero 2y ago

Answer: The very bad math drying up the Colorado River https://youtu.be/AzpYHXgfbbI?si=Snwfv4ocXn018CF_ https://youtu.be/AzpYHXgfbbI?si=Snwfv4ocXn018CF_

cdaringe 2y ago

I used to live in Albuquerque, which sources water from a few places—a small mountain range to the east, aquifer, and the rio grande (aka the rio not-at-all-grande). > Settlements in the region depend on groundwater. In the 1960s the City of Albuquerque began to extract large quantities of potable groundwater from wells drilled in the southeast and northeast heights. It was thought that this water came from a huge aquifer that would take centuries to exhaust. In the late 1980s there were declines in the water levels near Coronado Center causing concern that the water resource was not properly understood [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albuquerque_Basin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albuquerque_Basin Whoopsie! The RG AFAIK is also supplied by primary Colorado mountain sources, but also from various other smaller mountain and rainfall feeds. I get that the Colorado River is the big kahuna. Id would love to see the RG at least casually discussed in these bigger sw water discussions.