It was a record-smashing first quarter for the American West.
An astonishing heat wave smothered the region for weeks. Mountain snowpack, already low in many states after a rainy winter, melted quickly. Drought conditions intensified.
And it’s only early April. Scientists warn that extreme conditions could continue and cause water shortages and raging wildfires.
Dwindling snowpack is a big warning signs, climate experts say. Low snow levels in the spring often foretell drought. Recent research suggests that “snow drought” can worsen wildfires.
A March 23 study in Environmental Research Letters found that in years with earlier snow melt in the West, wildfires generally burned more acres. In years with low snowpack, wildfires were generally more severe and more destructive to the natural landscape.
“The main impact [of low snowpack] this year might be with respect to fire conditions, particularly in the mountain areas,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the California Institute for Water Resources and a research partner at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in a live YouTube talk on March 31.
The extreme conditions in the first quarter of 2026 reflect climate change at work, scientists add. March’s record-breaking temperatures would have been “virtually impossible” without the influence of global warming, a recent study concluded. The heat has set the stage for this summer’s imminent risks.
Here’s what happened in the first quarter — and what might happen this summer.
Heat stuns scientists
Even though weather forecasts predicted that the March heat wave would smash records, scientists were stunned as some local temperatures soared up to 30 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.
More than 1,100 daily temperature records were broken across 235 U.S. cities in March. Seventeen states saw their hottest March temperature on record, according to climatologist Maximiliano Herrera. And at least 33 cities experienced their hottest March on record, according to the science nonprofit Climate Central.
It may also have been the hottest March on record for the country. Scientists are analyzing nationwide temperature data, but a preliminary analysis by climatologist Brian Brettschneider suggests that March 2026 beat the previous March record, set in 2012, by at least a half a degree Fahrenheit.
The heat wave “was probably the most statistically and meteorologically extreme heat event that has occurred in the Southwestern U.S.,” said Swain in his YouTube talk. “For as long as we’ve kept rigorous records of extreme heat events, this was the singularly most anomalous one.”
‘Snow drought’ blankets the West
As temperatures soared across the West, mountain snowpack melted quickly.
“Every major river basin and state in the West is experiencing a snow drought,” NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System reported in March.
Melting snow recharges reservoirs and other water systems across the region each spring, and snowpack levels on April 1 are a key indicator of the amount of water that will trickle down through the summer. But rapid, early snowmelt — like what happened this spring -– can raise the risk of water shortages.
The Colorado River basin, which supplies drinking water to nearly 40 million people, has seen some of the worst declines. Snow melted much faster than normal during March in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada and California.
March was an exceptional month for heat and snowmelt. But much of the West had already experienced an unusually warm winter, with more rain and less snow than usual. These conditions, combined with March’s staggering heat wave and rapid melt rates, have resulted in critically low snowpack levels across much of the region.
As of March 31, more than half of the 1,044 monitoring stations scattered across the Western states had recorded their lowest snowpack levels on record for the date — the time of year when snowpack is typically at its highest. Roughly 62 percent of weather stations had snowpack levels on March 31 that were below 50 percent of their average levels on that date. Forty-eight percent were at less than 25 percent of the average.
The snowpack levels are “just super duper alarming,” Swain said in his YouTube talk. “There’s really no other way to put it.”
Soil moisture, meanwhile, was near or above average at monitoring stations across the West at the end of March, due largely to the rapid snowmelt seeping, according to Swain. The moisture levels could portend dry conditions and higher wildfire risks this the summer.
“Even though soil moisture is higher than average now, it will probably end up being significantly lower than average by mid [to] late summer,” Swain said. “Later in the summer, it’s much more likely that the higher elevation forests will dry out.”
General US drought hits record
General drought conditions — distinct from snow drought — intensified across the West in the first three months of 2026. Between the beginning of January and the end of March, the percentage of the U.S. landscape facing the worst drought conditions increased to 15 percent of the country from 2 percent, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
The Drought Severity and Coverage Index combines data on precipitation, soil moisture, snowpack, water-evaporation rates and other measurements. The index at the end of March hit its most severe first-quarter level since at least 2000.
Conditions are likely to worsen across the West, according to NOAA’s spring weather outlook, which cites low snowpack, below-average precipitation and above-average temperatures expected through June.
Nebraska’s largest wildfire ever occurred in March
Wildfires have been intense, burning more than 1.6 million acres in the first quarter of this year, more than double the average for January through March over the past decade.
Roughly 900,000 acres burned in Nebraska alone, a record for the state, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. The Morrill Fire, which raged across Nebraska’s sandhills last month, burned 643,000 acres, making it Nebraska’s largest wildfire ever.
The combination of above-average temperatures, below-average precipitation, low snowpack and expanding drought has primed the West for more fires. The fire center warns of significant fire potential for parts of the central and southern High Plains, as well as the Southeast U.S. in April.
New Mexico, Arizona and parts of Northern California face above average risks in May and June. The Pacific Northwest, Colorado and Utah will see elevated risks in July, along with eastern Nevada and southern Idaho.
