Environmental Project

Legislators told of dire Upper Colorado River conditions
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With major western reservoirs like Lake Powell and Lake Mead declining to historic low levels, water officials in New Mexico presented on the dire Upper Colorado River Basin conditions to the Senate Conservation Committee on Thursday. Estevan Lopez, the state’s Upper Colorado River Compact Commissioner and the governor’s representative on Colorado River matters, spoke about how climate change is impacting the hydrology in the basin. “Even if we don’t know what’s going to happen to precipitation, we know that temperatures are going up and as a result of that, the precipitation that we do get in the basin…much more of that is precipitation in the form of rain as opposed to snow…When we do get snow, that provides a natural reservoir high up in the mountains where the water is released slowly over time and it spreads the water around for the whole year,” he said. He said in addition to reducing the amount of snow in favor of rain,hotter temperatures induced by climate change also mean more evaporation of snowpack and surface waters, leading to less runoff into the water system. Lopez said last year there was a good snowpack, but the higher temperatures led to less runoff than anticipated.