After a record dry winter and a summer-like March, the latest water outlook for Lake Powell and the greater Colorado River Basin shows an increasingly grim future.

“This water year is going to be extremely difficult,” said William Merkley, manager of the Uintah Water Conservancy District.

Powell will receive 1.4 million acre-feet of inflow this April to July — just 22% of average, according to the April 1 forecast from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. That’s a nearly 1 million acre-feet drop from the center’s March forecast.

That could mean an even worse outlook for Powell than last forecasted by the Bureau of Reclamation in its March report, which showed Powell dropping below “power pool,” or 3,490 feet, by the end of December. At that level, Glen Canyon Dam can no longer produce electricity and can’t sustain long-term releases downstream to Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico.

The seven states that share the Colorado River — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — and the bureau have been discussing options to prop up Lake Powell.

The bureau has said it is considering reducing flows out of Powell from 7.48 million acre-feet to 6 million acre-feet — the maximum allowable reduction under a 2024 near-term operating plan for Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

The agency has also discussed releasing 500,000 acre-feet of water from Flaming Gorge and other upstream Colorado River reservoirs.

“Those two tools taken together at those levels are not sufficient to prevent Lake Powell from going below 3,500, according to these most recent forecasts,” said Anne Castle, a senior fellow at the University of Colorado’s Getches-Wilkinson Center.

When Lake Powell drops to 3,500 feet, infrastructure damage begins to happen at Glen Canyon Dam, and the bureau has said it aims to stay above that level.

“It appears that Reclamation is looking at releasing up to a million acre-feet from Flaming Gorge in order to preserve 3,500 and maybe preserve a buffer a little above 3,500,” Castle added.

The bureau would not confirm its plans for releases from Flaming Gorge on Wednesday, but said drought conditions may force the agency to increase how much it releases.

Flaming Gorge currently has 80% of its full capacity, or about 3 million acre-feet of active storage, and the latest forecast predicts the reservoir will receive barely more than half of the normal runoff from April to July, for a total of 490,000 acre-feet of water.

“Our most immediate concern with additional Flaming Gorge releases is the recreation economy of Daggett County,” said Merkley, who also co-chairs the Colorado River Authority of Utah’s central advisory council.

“Flaming Gorge can only be called upon so many times before it joins lower river reservoirs with critically low elevations,” he added. “It can provide real temporary benefits to help protect critical elevations at Lake Powell, but it is not the solution to the supply-and-demand imbalance we have on the river.”

The bureau will publish an updated study next week with the latest reservoir forecasts, the agency said. That will be followed later by details on the agency’s plans to keep Powell above critical elevations.

What’s causing the poor water supply outlook

March’s temperatures “smashed” records across Utah and neighboring southwest states, according to the forecast center.

Alta, where March high temperatures are usually in the 30s, reached 60 degrees or more for eight days last month. Temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona, reached at least 100 degrees on nine days, including the city’s earliest 100-degree day on record.

Meanwhile, Utah and neighboring states had the lowest-ever observed snowpack conditions as of April 1.

“At no time since systematic snowpack measurements began around 1930 has the snowpack been this low in the state of Utah,” a special report from the Natural Resources Conservation Service said. The next lowest measurement was in 2015, but snowpack was still five times higher that year.

The combination of poor snowpack and high March temperatures that led to a “huge snowmelt” has increased the likelihood of record low runoff to Powell, said Cody Moser, forecaster with the center.

One potential positive from this abnormal winter: soil moisture has increased. That means increased runoff efficiency as less snowmelt seeps into a sponge-like dry ground.

“It is nice to see above-average soil moisture conditions, but it’s due to a couple negative reasons,” Moser said. “One being receiving more rain versus snow this winter, and another being some of that mid- and high-elevation snow melt that has happened much earlier than normal this year. So we are losing some of that snow pack, a lot of that snow pack in fact, to get to the soil moisture conditions.”

That soil moisture also might not last that long. If hot conditions persist in April and melt the rest of the snow, the state and greater Colorado River Basin will likely see much drier soils this summer, Moser said.

Weather forecasts over the next two weeks show some chances for rain and high elevation snowfall, but above average temperatures will “dominate” through mid-April, according to the center.

This article is published through the Colorado River Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative supported by the Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water, and Air at Utah State University. See all of our stories about how Utahns are impacted by the Colorado River at greatsaltlakenews.org/coloradoriver.