Science Friday - What A Snow Drought In The West Means For The Rest Of 2026

Episode Date: February 19, 2026

While parts of the eastern and southern US have had unusually high snowfall this year, Colorado and Utah are in a snow drought. The abysmal winter sports season is just the tip of the melting iceberg: Snowpack is key to providing water throughout the year for the drought-stricken region. Joining Host Flora Lichtman to talk about this unusual winter are reporter David Condos and climate scientist Brad Udall.Guests:David Condos is the Southern Utah Reporter at KUER based in St. George.Brad Udall is a senior water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey, it's Flor Lictman, and you're listening to Science Friday. While those of us in the Northeast have been shoveling our sidewalks again and again and again this winter, the western U.S. is in a snow drought. Snowpack in Colorado and Utah has been at record lows, and people are freaked out about it. Not only because it hurts winter sports and those businesses, that's the tip of the melting iceberg. Here to tell us more is David Condo's reporter at KUER Public Radio based in St. George, Utah. Hey, David.

Hi, Flora. Okay. Would you agree with my assessment that people are freaked out? I think that is a fair and accurate assessment for Utah. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely the topic of conversation. People are talking about it. It's the small talk that comes up at the grocery store or you, you know, pass somebody, you know, on the sidewalk.

It's a big deal. I mean, Utah, as you may have heard, is kind of builds itself as the greatest snow on earth. It takes great pride. It's a big part of the economy. A big part of the culture here is what, winter sports. But yeah, even just you're not a skier, we can see the mountains wherever we go. I can see the mountains from my house, you know, and that's the case for a lot of Utahans. And so just seeing them either bald or, you know, with less snow than usual or kind of intermittent snow through the

winter is just this kind of weird, constant reminder of the situation that we're in. And it goes way beyond winter sports, right? What's the concern here? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, the big concern, and I think a lot of U-Tons are aware of this, is our water supply. I mean, it's really, it's hard to overstate how important snow is for our water in Utah. It's the state estimates that 95% of our water supply for cities and communities comes from melting snow. I mean, this is the desert. We don't get a lot of rain. We don't have a lot of big rivers that are running year-round. And so we really need this melting snow to refill our reservoirs, the reservoirs that cities depend on, big ones like Lake Powell, which is this critical key of the Colorado River system. And so,

you know, essentially just without snow, we just don't have much water supply. I mean, this is like our shot every year to get the snow and then to have it come down nice and easy in the spring and summer to trickle into those reservoirs. Wow. So the stakes are high because it's not just your water supply, right? Yeah. Well, this is part of the Upper Colorado River Basin here in Utah. And so, yeah, when Colorado and Utah and these kind of mountain states that are the headwaters for the Colorado River system are having a bad year, then, yeah, that's bad for tens of millions of people from Los Angeles to Phoenix to all over the place. Because like I mentioned, Lake Powell is already very, very low. People probably remember the headlines from the past few years. And so if it's already low and then it's not going to get refilled to the way that, you know, to the level that we would hope it would get.

then, yeah, that just puts more strain on everything. And yeah, it's the whole West. Does it feel existential? Oh, I think it's very up in your face. I mean, and that's, you know, with the Colorado River negotiations going on right now, it's very, like you said, the stakes are very high. It is hard to look away from how important this is. And yeah, I mean, I think existential is certainly a good word for it. It's kind of like, well, if this is what we're having this year, And, you know, science tells us, you know, years like this may come around more often. Yeah, as we go into the future, what does that mean for a place like Utah where, you know, people love to live? But it's just a very dry state. David Condos reporter at KUER Public Radio based in St. George.

David, thanks for filling us in. Yeah, thank you, Flora. We have to take a quick break. But when we come back, we're unpacking this snowpack problem with an expert who has spent his career studying water in the West. Don't go away. What does the snow drought mean for the future of life out west? Up next, sifting through some of the granular details of this hydrology story. Like, how unusual is this year's snow drought and what are the downstream effects, including the impact on the ongoing Colorado River negotiations?

Here with me is Brad Udall. He spent his career untangling how climate change is affecting hydrology in the American West. He's a research scientist at Colorado State University. Brad, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Okay, so how historic is this year's low snowpack? Well, it's grim, and it may not be the worst on record, but it's darn close in the case of the Colorado River to the two worst years we've seen, 1976, 77, and 8081. Those are two really bad years, and if this continues, we might actually end up below the flows of those two years.

Is this just about precipitation or temperature too? No, there's a huge temperature signal in this. And of course, it's anthropogenic. It's human cause. So what we've seen out west since October is about temperatures 5 Fahrenheit warmer than normal, which is a lot. It may not sound like a lot, but it is. Here in Colorado, it's been in December, it was 10 Fahrenheit warmer than normal. And this is part of this ongoing trend of the American West, especially in Colorado.

a river where it's a lot warmer and that warmth has all kinds of implications for the future. Wow. I mean, we've been using the term snow drought. Is drought the right word to describe what's happening? You know, it's really not. So drought is something that's temporary, right? And in the 20th century, we had floods and droughts, floods and droughts. But the real word we need to start using is a mouthful. It's a ridification. And it means the long-term. term warming and drying that we've been seeing since the year 2000. And there's a whole bunch of stuff with aridification, shorter winters, longer summers, more heat on any given day, more evaporation, more rain, less snow. I mean, there's a whole list of it. And that's exactly what

we're seeing. And this year is just yet one more indication of this aridification trend. How precisely do we understand the link between anthropogenic clans, change and what is happening, for instance, this season out West? So part of it we understand and part of it we don't. So we really understand well these higher temperatures. There's no doubt these higher temperatures are related to greenhouse gas emissions. You know, it's up almost three Fahrenheit in the Colorado River Basin since 1970. It's going to double that by 2050, believe it or not.

The second part of the equation that we don't understand is precipitation. Why is this precipitation down? And since year 2000 in the Colorado River Basin, the precipitation is down about 7% per year. None of it is actually in the winter. The December, January, February period, the core winter out here, we're getting our normal precipitation. But the rest of the year, we're seeing these declines. And it may very well turn out that these declines are, in fact, human cause, but the science right now is uncertain about that. You know, we heard from David, our last guest, that Utah gets 95% of its water from snowpack.

What are some of the other longer term impacts of this year's lack of snow? So there's a whole bunch of them, and they're all pretty depressing. So one thing we're going to see is a whole bunch of... Buckle up, listeners. Yep. One thing we're going to see this summer is a whole bunch of fires. And I'll tell you, if you live out west, big fire seasons are not something to be looked forward to. I remember here in 2021, driving through an orange Martian landscape in the middle of the day as the continental divide burned just to the west of us.

So fires for sure. Less soil moisture, which makes it harder on wildlife and on plants and on farmers. And in the case of the Colorado River, it means less water for the 40 million people that use this system. And that's part of these ongoing negotiations about how we're going to share the required cutbacks in Colorado River use. Does this year make those negotiations more urgent? It sure does. In the year 2000, the nation's two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, were completely chocked full, and they're now 70% empty. All the rules and regulations around the operation of those reservoirs expire this year.

And on top of that, we have this incredibly crummy snowpack. So the urgency is there to get a deal done, but unfortunately, we haven't seen any progress on these negotiations. So for these negotiations over the Colorado River, I mean, how much water use reduction are we talking about? Okay. So since the year 2000, the nation's two largest reservoirs, Lake Pal and Mead, have lost 70% of their supply. And the river is down 20%. Of that 20%, half is due to higher temperatures. And the remaining half is due to this reduction in precipitous. which may or may not be human caused. We are now talking to get the system in balance of very large reductions of somewhere around the order of the decline in flow. So around the order of about 20% of river use is what we're looking at.

But because we anticipate more reductions in Colorado River flow, we may need to account fully for a 40% loss of the river flow. And those are cutbacks that would affect, you know, all entities that use Colorado River water. I guess I'm wondering, like, that seems beyond, you know, whether someone takes a long shower. We must be talking about agriculture at this point. In the Colorado River Basin, as is the case in almost every arid river system around the world, about 70% of the water is used by agriculture. And the remaining 30% is used by municipalities and in the industry. And the size of the needed cuts to solve this problem mean that you can't do this just by dealing with municipalities and industry.

Agriculture is going to have to take the lion's share of these cuts. And that means very fundamental changes in how agriculture operates in the American Southwest. Like what? What's very fundamental changes like it doesn't exist to the same degree? Or what are those changes? So in the case of Arizona, which unfortunately is a junior water rights holder in the case of the Colorado River, a whole bunch of agriculture on that state, unfortunately, is going to have to go away. This is agricultural in the center part of the state. But even that probably doesn't solve the solution.

And I think what you're going to see is other parts of the agricultural system are going to either have to go out. of business are going to have to change alternative crops or maybe grow crops only sometimes of the year in the lower basin that may be in the cooler months of the year where those crops are really valuable and not so much in the hotter months when less valuable crops are grown. So, you know, I think we're going to get to do a rethink on agriculture and it's going to be painful, unfortunately, but that's the only way you solve this problem is a big contribution from ag. I mean, that's so devastating, obviously, to farmers who work in these areas.

Do people dispute this? I mean, is there a controversy over whether that is the direction that we will ultimately need to go? Oh, yeah. Well, this is highly contentious. And it's why the seven states have not been able to agree on anything that looks like a solution. And in the case of Arizona, I mean, the cuts may be so big.

that ultimately some long existing agriculture along the Colorado River that has senior rights may have to give away so that municipalities in the center part of the state that have junior water rights can actually continue to get access to water. And this is like the third rail in Arizona. I mean, this is a really big deal to transfer water out of ag into the central part of the state where everybody lives. But it's both politically and economically necessary. Are there efficiencies in water usage that are on the table that could help solve this? Maybe, but most people actually get this wrong. Water's not like gasoline where you get one chance to use it, and by gosh, you better make sure that use is efficient. It's a little appreciated in water use that a lot of water that's actually applied to agriculture actually runs off the field and ends up.

back in a river downstream and gets to be reused. So when you look at things in agriculture that nominally look inefficient like flood irrigation, you're neglecting the fact that water has what's called return flows that it actually ends up back in the river and gets rediverted by some downstream water user. And oftentimes water efficiency measures, believe it or not, actually lead to increases in water use, not reductions, paradoxically. That's fascinating. I mean, I think we also often hear that the water crisis is related to, you know, people moving to cities out West. Is that true? No, it's not true at all. And a classic case would be Las Vegas, which has cut their water use by about a third since around 1980, yet having twice the population. The story of municipalities around the American West is that they have pursued these very slow 1% per year.

efficiency improvements from toilets and low flow showerheads and more efficient washers and the like. And over 50 years or 40 plus years, those 1% per year increases really add up. And so you end up with a Las Vegas that's serving twice as many customers with two-thirds the amount of water that they did 40 or 50 years ago. I mean, if there's no consensus on these Colorado River negotiations, what happens? What happens for the people living and relying on this water? So what you're going to see, I believe, is that federal government's going to impose a solution. And nobody's going to like that solution. Litigation will start. A lot of the litigation will be states putting stakes in the ground for their particular rights that they want to preserve. Hopefully the negotiations will continue in the background. And, you know, at some point, we will get.

get a negotiated compromise. The lesson from one of the last times there was big litigation in the Colorado River back in the 1960s is that the courts are completely inadequate to solve a problem like this. It involves, you know, again, 40 million people, seven different states, 30 Indian tribes, two nations. Mexico is a part of this as well. A court just can't get this right. It's way too complicated and you're far better off with a negotiated solution. But unfortunately, right now the parties to this negotiation are really far apart. You know, with climate change, there's always been this often repeated line. You know, if we fail to act, this and this will happen.

Do you feel like we're past that? Like we're now just into adaptation land? In the case of the Colorado River, we're going to get to adapt. I mean, that's very clearly the case. But to give up on, you know, reducing our greenhouse gas emissions is completely silly and counterproductive and stupid, frankly. So, you know, no, we're not beyond the need or the ability to act to stop this. But in the case of the Colorado River, we've dug ourselves a really big hole here. and it's going to take a whole lot of work to climb out of it.

And unfortunately, any actions around reducing greenhouse gases wouldn't be timely in this case. Brad Udall is a water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University. Brad, thanks for joining me today. My pleasure. This episode was produced by Kathleen Davis. And if you know a friend who's in a podcast drought, I'm sorry, is that a bad joke?

I'm trying to lighten the mood here. Why not recommend Science Friday to them? Please help us get the word out about the show. show. And if you have questions or topics you want us to investigate, please give us a ring. 8774 SciFri. Thanks for listening. I'm Florida Lichtman.