Reservoirs may dry up, study says
The West’s great reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, could run dry by 2021 without a drastic change in water consumption, according to an analysis released Tuesday.
The two reservoirs, which now contain 25 million acre-feet of water, are losing about 1 million acre-feet a year as a result of rising demand and persistent drought.
The study, to be published in the journal Water Resources Research, analyzed how global warming is likely to increase the strain on the Colorado River. Climate models predict that precipitation will decline and evaporation will increase across much of the western United States.
The reservoirs serve as protection against drought for the 27 million people who rely on water from the Colorado.
“The only option is to not take as much water out,” said Tim Barnett, a marine geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla and lead author of the study.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the Colorado River, has a plan to reduce allocations if the reservoirs drop below certain levels.
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