Opinion: California floods portend a catastrophic future for the Colorado River

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If the Green River merged with the Colorado River, also at flood, the Colorado River would carry almost five times more water than the 120,000 cfs that barreled into Glen Canyon Dam

A view of the Glen Canyon Dam at Lake Powell on March 27, 2022 in Page, Arizona. As severe drought grips parts of the Western United States, water levels at Lake Powell dropped to their lowest level since the lake was created by the damming the Colorado River in 1963.Moab, Utah, gets just eight inches of rain per year, yet rainwater flooded John Weisheit’s basement last summer. Extremes are common in a desert: Rain and snow are rare, and a deluge can cause flooding.

Weisheit points to BuRec research by Robert Swain in 2004, showing an 1884 spring runoff that delivered two years’ worth of Colorado River flows in just four months. These storms happen every year, but what makes them feel new is their ferocity, which some scientists blame on climate change warming the oceans and heating the air to make more powerful storms.

“Forty percent of the snowpack in the upper Colorado in the winter is from atmospheric river storms penetrating that far inland,” he adds. In Utah that winter, John Doyle Lee chronicled the washing away of the town of Santa Clara along the tiny Santa Clara River near St. George. Buildings and farms floated away, leaving only a single wall of a rock fort that townspeople had built on high ground.

 

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