Federal forecasters are predicting an increasingly dire summer across the Colorado River basin, with the latest projections showing the waterway on track for record-low flows.
The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center’s May projections for the West’s most important river show just 13 percent of average flows into the river’s biggest headwaters reservoir, Lake Powell, amounting to just 800,000 acre-feet.
“The record hot and dry winter is the main story,” Cody Moser, a hydrologist with the center, said on a webinar Thursday. “Just really no good news this winter.”
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Monitoring stations across the region’s mountainous headwaters registered record-low snowpack at many locations, he said.
