Western snowpack alarm

The West is heading into spring with one of its most important water stores missing. In the mountains, winter snow normally piles up for months, then melts slowly into rivers, reservoirs, farms, and cities. This year, much of that water never sat in the snowbank long enough to do its job. Across the region, snowpack is sitting at record to near-record lows for early April, and in Colorado the statewide figure fell to 26% of median on April 2, the lowest for that date since records began in 1941. That number is startling because April is usually the moment when the mountain snowpack is near its peak. In much of the West, this is the annual high-water mark of frozen storage. Instead, the snow season effectively collapsed early. USDA SNOTEL data for April 4 showed major deficits almost everywhere that matters for runoff: the Upper Colorado Basin at 24% of median, the Great Basin at 18%, the Lower Colorado at 14%, and the Rio Grande and Arkansas-White-Red basins at just 8%. In Colorado itself, basin values were brutal, with the Gunnison at 23%, the Upper Colorado at 30%, the Arkansas at 15%, and the Upper Rio Grande at 16%. The reason is not just that storms were scarce. In many places, precipitation did arrive. It just fell into the wrong season in the wrong form. Federal drought tracking has been blunt about this winter: every major river basin in the West had its warmest or second-warmest December-through-February on record. That warmth pushed snow lines uphill. Mid-elevation storms that once would have banked water as snow instead fell as rain, ran off quickly, or vanished into dry ground and air. Then March made a bad year worse. In Colorado, state climatologist Russ Schumacher wrote that March 2026 will finish as the warmest March on record, roughly 3 to 4 degrees hotter than any other March in the state’s 132-year climate record. That heat did not just nibble at the edges of the snowpack. It erased it. California’s Department of Water Resources went to Phillips Station for the crucial April 1 survey and found no measurable snow at all, after what it described as a record-hot, dry March and a series of warm storms with high-elevation rain. That matters because western water systems are built around timing as much as volume. Snow is a natural reservoir. It releases water gradually into late spring and summer, when demand rises. Rain does not do that. It arrives fast, often in winter, when reservoirs may capture some of it but landscapes and rivers cannot store the rest in the same way. The result is a shifted water rhythm: more runoff earlier, less runoff later, and a sharper drop into summer dryness. The Colorado River basin is especially exposed to that shift because its headwaters depend so heavily on mountain snow. Federal drought updates in March described the basin’s snow water equivalent as record low and warned that impacts were already occurring and expected to worsen. California has one buffer that Colorado does not: reservoirs remain relatively healthy after wetter recent years, with Drought Monitor reporting Shasta and Oroville above average for late March. But reservoirs cannot replace a missing snowmelt season forever, and they do nothing for forests, rangelands, and smaller streams that depend on a slow thaw. By early April, many SNOTEL stations across the West were already reporting very shallow snow depths or bare ground.