New research predicts that changes in mountain snowmelt will shift peak streamflows to much earlier in the year for the vast Colorado River Basin, altering reservoir management and irrigation across the entire region.
“Because of global climate change, areas of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming could have much less water, and future hydrologic conditions may more closely resemble those of the arid Southwest regions of the basin today,” said Katrina Bennett, a hydrologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and coauthor of the paper published in the journal Earth and Space Science.