SOUTHERN UTE RESERVATION — Colorado’s snowpack has peaked, but forecasts show a break in the unseasonably hot temperatures and winter storms on the horizon.
This winter is setting the stage for a historic drought year in Colorado with the lowest snowpack on record and temperatures 30 degrees above the norm statewide. Drought conditions are deepening as each hot and dry week passes, with about 74% of Colorado in some level of drought as of March 24 according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
No area of the state is spared by the poor snowpack conditions, but southwestern Colorado currently is the worst, Jason Ullmann, Colorado’s state engineer, told hundreds of water users and professionals gathered at a Southwestern Water Conservation District conference Friday on the Southern Ute Reservation.
“We may get some additional snow. We may get additional rain, but likely not enough to bring that back up and get a second peak,” Ullmann said.
Colorado’s snowpack typically reaches its height April 8, with some smaller watersheds peaking earlier or later in the month. Spring runoff usually maxes out between mid-May and mid-June as snowmelt swells the state’s rivers and streams.
But a sweltering heat wave hit Colorado in mid-March, driving temperatures 20 to 30 degrees higher than normal and smashing records at nearly 20 weather stations in Colorado. Pueblo and Fort Collins recorded some of the highest March temperatures, 93 and 91 degrees Fahrenheit respectively.
The heat triggered an early, rapid snowmelt, and in two weeks, Colorado’s snowpack has plummeted into uncharted territory for this time of year, Ullmann told the gathering, pointing to a plunging black line on a graph that tracks Colorado’s snow accumulation statewide.
“We’re talking about being 20% below the previous low,” he said.
Some rivers in Colorado, like the San Juan River in Pagosa Springs, are already peaking as snowmelt flows downstream.
“I think ‘peak’ happened yesterday. The normal peak happens June 6,” Ullmann said about the San Juan River. “We’re talking about a month and a half early.”
But the heat wave is breaking, and Colorado is returning to more normal spring weather, Lucas Boyer, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Grand Junction, said Monday.
The temperatures will be slightly above normal this week but with more cloud cover to offer relief. There will be 6 to 12 inches of snowfall Tuesday through Thursday morning above 9,000 feet across the Rocky Mountains, with the northern mountains receiving more snowfall later in the week.
“Today is one of the last days of it being as warm as it has been,” he said.
Still, this spring’s significant snowmelt means more water users, like farmers and ranchers, will be cut off early this summer, said Ullmann — who, as Colorado’s top water cop, is in charge of closing headgates and plugging pipes when there is not enough water to go around.
“I’m not trying to say, ‘Oh my gosh, the sky is falling.’ The system is set up for dry years,” Ullmann said.
The state’s unpredictable precipitation prompted Coloradans in the late 1800s to set up a legal system, known as the prior appropriation doctrine, to decide who gets cut off early in dry years, he said.
The state’s residents have built reservoir after reservoir to catch snowmelt and control the flow of spring runoff. Farmers, ranchers and other water users downstream from reservoirs will be able to tap into those reservoirs as savings banks this year.
(Reservoir storage might be low by the end of the summer, which means water users will need a wet winter to refill their storage. If next winter’s snowfall is poor to average, the reservoirs will have trouble rebounding.)
Farmers and ranchers who do not have access to water stored in a reservoir will be in a worse situation, Ullmann said. The early snowmelt could run right by their land too early to be of use for crops.
“It is going to be really painful for people who don’t have storage this year,” he said.