On May 8, at a Colorado River Basin forecast webinar, a federal hydrologist named Cody Moser paused after delivering a set of numbers and said: "Really no good news this winter." [1]

The numbers support the statement. Lake Powell is projected to receive just 800,000 acre-feet of water through July — 13 percent of the reservoir's average inflow, and the lowest summer inflow in the sixty years since Glen Canyon Dam was completed. The previous record low was 2002, when 964,000 acre-feet entered the reservoir during the same period. This year's projection breaks that record. [1]

This paper established when Lake Powell turned to Flaming Gorge as a temporary backstop the buffer math and its limits. The Interior Department has authorized the release of up to one million acre-feet from Flaming Gorge reservoir on the Wyoming-Utah border to stabilize Powell. At current withdrawal rates, that backstop provides approximately ten weeks of buffer. After ten weeks, the math changes and nothing currently available fills the gap. [2]

Lake Powell is sitting at 23 percent capacity. Glen Canyon Dam, which the reservoir feeds, generates hydroelectric power for portions of Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. If the elevation drops below what the Bureau of Reclamation calls minimum power pool, the dam stops generating electricity. Projections suggest that threshold could be reached as soon as this summer. [3]

The Colorado River Compact allocates water downstream to Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico. These allocations were written in 1922, during a period that climate scientists now recognize was anomalously wet. The system was calibrated for a river that doesn't exist. What does exist is a river delivering 13 percent of the water that seven states and one country's agricultural and municipal infrastructure was designed to use. [1]

Nevada, California, and Arizona have proposed conserving an additional one million acre-feet annually through 2028. Colorado's water negotiator called this a positive first step and insufficient. The seven-basin states have not agreed on a framework. No federal emergency declaration has been issued. No Bureau of Reclamation 24-month study revision has been publicly released since the most recent inflow data updated the projections. [2]

Moser's pause before the phrase "no good news" was not rhetorical. He had just shown the webinar's audience the inflow graph — a line tracking 2026 against every prior year in the dataset, sitting at the bottom of the chart, below 2002, below every drought year on record. The long-term National Weather Service forecasts that accompanied the graph showed drought conditions worsening before they improve. There is no wet season arriving that changes the near-term math.

The question that the federal government has not publicly answered is whether this is a weather-driven anomaly — a bad year followed by a recovery — or the new baseline of a structurally drier Colorado River Basin under sustained climate change. The hydrological record since 2000 suggests the latter. Nineteen of the past twenty-six years have produced below-average runoff into the Colorado system. 2026 is the worst of those nineteen years, not an exception to them. [1]

The Flaming Gorge release will prop up Powell through the summer. What follows the release, and what follows the summer, is the question no one in federal water management is answering publicly.

That is also what Cody Moser meant when he paused.

-- DARA OSEI, London