For Star subscribers: Without climate change, the mandatory federal cutbacks in water deliveries that befell the Southwest in 2022 and 2023 wouldn't have been needed, UCLA study says.
Tony Davis Two new studies drive home the dramatic loss of water suffered by the Colorado River Basin this century, in which enough water disappeared from the river system to fill Lake Mead.
The second study, led by a Utah State University water researcher, concluded that by themselves, lakes Mead and Powell lost a bit more than that — about 33 million acre-feet — in the same period. Actually raising reservoirs to levels significantly higher than today would require deeper cuts of about another 1 million acre-feet a year, the study said.
"There is no longer an opportunity to sustain overconsumption" by drawing down the reservoirs"because the reservoirs are nearly empty," it said. This year, the three states approved a scaled-back plan to reduce their use by 13%, after a very wet and snowy winter blessed the river with its highest spring-summer runoff since 2011. But most water experts have agreed the one good winter wasn't enough to reverse 21 previous years of decline. The states and feds may well approve deeper cuts by 2026, when the river's current operating guidelines expire.
Using computer-based simulations and historical river and climate data, the UCLA researchers concluded that without the influence of warming and carbon dioxide since the pre-industrial era, annual runoff since 1954 would actually have increased by 4.6%, or nearly 750,000 acre-feet. Instead, the river has lost about 1.7 million acre-feet annually, the researchers said.
Finally, the researchers concluded that areas of the entire river basin that have heavier snowpack were affected far more by warming temperatures than those that don't. 'Use has to equal supply'The study led by Utah State's Schmidt framed the river's problems differently.
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