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By Joe Edwards
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Despite consecutive winters of decent snowfall, the two largest reservoirs in the United States—Lake Mead and Lake Powell—remain far from full.
Lake Powell, situated along the Arizona-Utah border, and Lake Mead, located near Las Vegas, are both integral components of the Colorado River system. The Colorado River Basin supplies water to more than 40 million people across seven states and Mexico.
These water bodies are essential not only for drinking water and agriculture but also for hydropower generation and recreation. While gains have been made in previous years, storage remains a concern due to ongoing drought impacts and high water demands.
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In 2023, a snowy winter brought much-needed relief to the region, with snow levels surpassing one-and-a-half times the typical amount for the past three decades, The Salt Lake Tribune reported earlier this month.
The following melt sent 10.6 million acre-feet of water rushing into Lake Powell through spring and summer. This was more than 160 percent of the average runoff from 1991 to 2020. That surge helped the reservoir recover from a record low of 22 percent in February, climbing to 38 percent by July.
The Colorado River Basin saw levels hit 113 percent of the median in 2024, though this resulted in a runoff of just 83 percent—around 5.3 million acre-feet for lake Powell, the newspaper said.
"Everybody keeps hoping that the only way we're going to really rebuild storage is if we have another ridiculous, gangbuster year like 2023," Utah State University watershed sciences professor Jack Schmidt told The Salt Lake Tribune.
However, "that's highly unlikely," he added.
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Recent forecasts indicate that, even after the mountain snow melts, Lake Mead and Lake Powell are expected to stay at about one-third of their capacity, the newspaper reported.
According to Schmidt, much of the struggle stems from snowmelt being absorbed by parched soils before reaching the reservoirs.
Drier than usual soil means that this year's 94 percent of median snowpack levels will convert to just 67 percent of normal runoff into Lake Powell, according to The Salt Lake Tribune's report.
A recent report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) noted that the winter of 2025 "hasn't measured up to 2024 and is far short of the records set in 2023."
It also warned that "Southern Nevada should expect a lean water year with less than normal streamflow predicted for the Virgin River and the Colorado River inflow to Lake Powell."
A separate study from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) found that just over a quarter of municipal wastewater in the seven basin states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—is being recycled, a practice researchers suggested could make a "dramatic" difference for water supply in the area.
The study suggested that if basin states raised their water reuse rates to 40 percent, they could collectively save nearly 900,000 acre-feet of water each year—enough to supply almost 2 million homes. Increasing reuse to 50 percent could push annual savings to 1.3 million acre-feet.
Hydrologist Jeff Anderson, with the NRCS, told Newsweek that the NRCS is always working to improve how it tracks snow and predicts streamflow. In January 2024, it started using a new tool called M4, which uses machine learning to help make water forecasts faster and more accurate.
M4 picks the best weather stations to use in its models automatically, saving time and making the process more efficient. It combines results from six different models to create a more reliable average forecast, which helps avoid problems if one model doesn't perform well in a given year.
While this is a big upgrade behind the scenes, Anderson said the way the NRCS shares and explains forecasts to the public won't really change. These improvements will help people across the West who rely on accurate water forecasts—like farmers, city planners, and water managers—make better decisions.
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