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The West is receiving more precipitation than normal this year, but it's not enough to pull the region out of a megadrought that is straining the Colorado River. Increased snowpack in the Rocky Mountains could lead to rising Colorado River reservoirs, as more than two-thirds of the river begins as snow in Colorado. But scientists say it's too soon to tell whether this will come to pass.
“Everybody is so eager to make an early call on this,” Brad Udall, a water and climate researcher at Colorado State University, told KUNC. “Invariably, you'll get caught with your pants down if you think you know what's going to happen.”
Even if the wet winter continues, it won't be enough to offset 23 years of drought in the West, and a string of similarly wet years is unlikely because of rising temperatures due to climate change, according to Udall. Since 1970, temperatures in the Colorado River Basin have gone up by three degrees Fahrenheit, and those higher temperatures have caused a 15 percent drop in streamflows across the region.
Finally, one wet winter could actually make matters worse by delaying water-saving action. The federal government is asking states that rely on the Colorado River to stop using at least 2 million acre-feet of water this year in order to stabilize the river, and it's harder for states to make those cuts when reservoirs are rising.
“Wet years buy us time, and that makes it easy to kick the can—which if we’re honest, is what basin states have been doing for years,” Joanna Allhands wrote in the Arizona Republic.
Colorado photographer donates life's work to state archive
Nationally renowned photographer, publisher, teacher, and environmentalist John Fielder is donating more than 5,000 photos of Colorado distilled from 200,000 made since 1973 to History Colorado, the state’s historical preservation arm.
This spring, History Colorado will make Fielder's photographs available for anyone to search and download for personal and commercial use, as well as host ongoing exhibitions featuring his work. The first exhibition will open in the summer of 2023 at the History Colorado Center in Denver.
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My images represent the sublimeness of the place that I think is the most beautiful on Earth …Colorado. They are both documentary and artistic... However, they represent something else, perhaps even more important than their sense of place: they are a record of Nature as of 2022.”
